Elon Musk is unleashing SpaceX's new war chest to solve his AI problem

Elon Musk has admitted SpaceX lags behind rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and even Google and Chinese open-source models in the race to build out artificial intelligence.

- Becky Peterson

He now has an $86 billion war chest to help change that. And the first target is getting enterprise customers who Musk hopes are willing to pay large sums for access to SpaceX’s tools and computing power.

SpaceX reached a $60 billion all-stock deal to buy autonomous coding agent Cursor, a San Francisco startup that built a product used by the biggest AI labs and companies like Nvidia, British Airways and Deloitte.

SpaceX in recent months has restructured itself around the desire to build out its artificial-intelligence capabilities. It acquired Musk-controlled firm xAI earlier this year, which brought chat assistant Grok and the social-media site X, as well as large data centers into the fold.

In April, SpaceX said it had secured the option to buy Cursor. The big prize that comes with buying it now: a reliable stream of revenue.

Before SpaceX completed the largest initial public offering ever, Musk sold investors on his vision for AI that can take humans beyond Earth and “enable humanity to understand the universe.” On Tuesday, he touted AI's potential to eventually write and debug code better than any human.

“AI will achieve Stockfish-level coding and generalized computer use,” Musk said about the Cursor deal, referencing a popular chess engine that can beat the best human players.