Microsoft Passed on Cursor Before SpaceX $60B Deal
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- Microsoft considered buying Cursor in recent weeks but chose not to make an offer, even as it has been working to boost GitHub Copilot's popularity
- SpaceX obtained the right to acquire Cursor for $60 billion, announcing the deal this week with an option it says it can exercise later this year
- Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital are poised for a major financial windfall from SpaceX's bid, per Bloomberg
- Michael Truell, Cursor's 25-year-old CEO and former Google intern, is the face of the deal, per Fortune
- The partnership includes plans to build coding AI together, with SpaceX potentially letting Cursor train on xAI's supercomputer
- Cursor is positioned as a competitor to Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, with The Decoder framing the move as aimed at closing xAI's coding gap
Why it matters: Microsoft passed on a potential Cursor acquisition while SpaceX moved ahead with a $60 billion option, showing how aggressively Musk's companies are absorbing top AI coding talent. The projected a16z and Thrive windfall underscores how the deal's economics concentrate returns on the VCs who backed Cursor early — not on the engineers building it.
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