Sualeh Asif (Pakistan-Born Co-Founder) Secures $60 Billion Deal with Elon Musk to Acquire Cursor AI

A deal that sidelines a $2 billion funding round and positions Elon Musk's company to dominate AI coding ahead of a record IPO.

SpaceX announced Tuesday it has secured the right to acquire Cursor, the fast-growing AI code-generation startup co-founded by Pakistani-born entrepreneur Sualeh Asif, for $60 billion later this year, in what would rank among the largest technology acquisitions ever completed.

The deal, announced by SpaceX in a post on X, gives the company the option to acquire Cursor outright or, if it chooses not to proceed, pay $10 billion for the two companies' collaborative work together.

"SpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI," SpaceX said in its post on X.

Cursor CEO Michael Truell followed with a post of his own, saying he was excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale up Composer, referring to his company's AI model.

The announcement caught the venture capital market off guard. Until a few hours before SpaceX unveiled the agreement, Cursor was on track to close a $2 billion funding round later this week, at a valuation of $50 billion. Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Nvidia, and Battery Ventures were all expected to participate.

SpaceX is delaying the potential acquisition until after its planned IPO this summer, largely because the company wants to avoid updating its confidential financial filings before the listing, and it will be easier to finance the $60 billion purchase using its new, publicly traded stock.

Even if SpaceX does not proceed with the full acquisition, Cursor is receiving a $10 billion capital injection paid out over time, giving the startup substantial runway regardless of outcome.

The Pakistani Co-Founder Behind the Deal

At the center of the story is Sualeh Asif, 26, born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. Asif attended Nixor College in Karachi and later moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he represented Pakistan in the International Math Olympiad from 2016 to 2018.

While studying at MIT, Asif co-founded Anysphere with three classmates, the company behind Cursor, which quickly became a popular AI-powered code editor.

Cursor's rise has been swift. The startup reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue within just two years of its 2022 founding and has already raised over $3 billion from private investors. Today, millions of software developers at 50,000 enterprises including Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, and Shopify use Cursor to generate and edit code, according to Forbes.

Cursor was valued at just $2.5 billion in January of last year, climbed to $9 billion by last May, and was assigned a $29.3 billion post-money valuation when it closed on $2.3 billion in Series D funding in November.

The move by Musk's rocket and satellite company comes as it prepares to become publicly traded, and shortly after it absorbed his artificial intelligence outfit xAI.

The SpaceX-Cursor tie-up reflects a broader pattern in the AI industry, where startups are increasingly seeking larger partners to secure the computing power needed to keep improving their models. Earlier this week, Amazon announced a $5 billion investment in Anthropic to give that startup access to its Trainium chips.

Acquiring Cursor gives Musk's company a stronger position in AI coding, currently the most commercially productive application of the technology, as it races to compete with OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code.

The deal could shore up weaknesses at each company: Cursor gains access to SpaceX's Colossus data centers in Mississippi and Tennessee, while SpaceX, widely seen as lacking a significant AI workforce, adds a leading consumer product with deep enterprise distribution.

SpaceX's IPO, targeted for June, is aiming for a valuation of $1.75 trillion to $1.8 trillion, potentially making it the largest public offering in history. Investors seeking more value in the IPO may view SpaceX's engagement with Cursor as another way to demonstrate the reach of Musk's sprawling tech conglomerate.

Despite Cursor's rapid revenue growth, the startup faces fierce competition from Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, and had been struggling to raise private capital at the scale needed to finance its computing requirements. The SpaceX deal, structured as it is, resolves that problem whether or not the acquisition closes.

SpaceX and Cursor did not immediately respond to requests for comment as of Thursday morning.