TL;DR: SpaceX has secured the right to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year—or pay $10 billion for their work together if it passes. The decision may hinge on whether Cursor can help xAI close the gap with Anthropic and OpenAI in coding—and for a company heading toward a blockbuster IPO, it's a high-stakes bet on the most valuable real estate in AI right now.

What happened: In a post on X yesterday, SpaceX said the two companies will work "closely together to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI"—with Cursor bringing the product and developer distribution and SpaceX contributing access to its Colossus supercomputer.

Cursor said in its announcement that it's been "bottlenecked by compute" and that Colossus will "push our training efforts much further." The deal also comes as xAI has faced a string of notable departures, with all of its founding team gone as of March.

A fast-changing landscape: Cursor was the hot coding assistant last year; OpenAI reportedly tried to buy it before making a bid for Windsurf (that deal fell through, though). But the market is shifting to more agentic coding tools, like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, which can plan and execute full workflows.

Unlike those rivals, Cursor doesn’t build its own foundation models. Its recent Composer 2 model was built on top of Chinese open-source model Kimi K2.5.

Enter X: xAI does build foundation models—the Grok family—but they aren’t considered competitive in coding capabilities compared to those of other top AI labs. It’s a notable weak spot as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all zero in on one of the most lucrative AI use cases. Cursor offers something xAI can't easily build internally: distribution to a large developer base, plus product feedback and usage signals that could sharpen Grok's coding capabilities.

The deal also builds in a hedge: If Cursor's data and distribution don't justify the full price, SpaceX can just pay out the $10 billion and still keep any improvements to Grok the partnership produced.

The CEO beef of it all: The announcement lands less than a week before a trial begins in the high-profile case between SpaceX founder (and OpenAI co-founder) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—OpenAI was even an early investor in Cursor. The timing adds another front to an already litigious rivalry.

Bottom line: A $60 billion acquisition is an unusual move for a company that’s reportedly preparing for a record IPO, but the built-in exit route makes this more option than obligation. The price tag also signals how much coding has become the defining battleground in AI. —PK

• Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest diagnoses a person can receive—and an mRNA vaccine may be starting to change that. Fewer than 13% of people diagnosed with it survive five years. In an early 16-patient trial, researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering—a leading cancer research hospital in New York—built a custom vaccine for each person using genetic material from their own tumor—the same mRNA technology behind Covid vaccines, applied to cancer—to train the immune system to hunt down cells left behind after surgery. Six years later, nearly all who responded are still alive. A larger trial is now underway, and if it holds up at scale, it could open the door to a new class of treatments for one of cancer's hardest cases.
• ️ A startup is betting on the reactor design almost no one else will build—and if it works, it could be the most reliable path yet to clean, unlimited energy. Nuclear fusion—the reaction that powers the sun—has been a goal of energy researchers for decades, but controlling it on Earth is extraordinarily difficult. Most companies working on it use the same basic reactor design, called a tokamak, which is easier to build but hard to keep stable (one US startup is already racing to bring tokamak-based power plants online). Proxima Fusion is taking a harder route: a twisted, more complex design called a stellarator that's harder to construct but theoretically far more stable to run. The Munich-based startup recently raised around $469 million (€400 million) to pursue it and is now building a prototype magnet, with testing planned for next year and a full machine targeted for the end of the decade.
• Quantum computers just took their first real step toward speeding up drug discovery. A team led by Helsinki-based Algorithmiq, working with IBM and the Cleveland Clinic, used a quantum computer to simulate how a cancer drug behaves at the molecular level—something ordinary computers struggle to do accurately. It won a $2 million prize from Wellcome Leap, a health research nonprofit, for being the first to prove it's possible. It did this during a 2.5-year, $50 million challenge. Notably, the top prize for outperforming classical computers outright went unclaimed. While that bar hasn't been cleared yet, this is the strongest signal so far that quantum computing could eventually change how drugs are found and developed. —SM

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Jensen Huang is, apparently, the Taylor Swift of Silicon Valley. At least, that aura of immense popularity is why one software engineer was drawn to a $178 sweater plastered with a cartoon version of the Nvidia CEO’s face. (Though he didn’t buy it, balking at the price tag.)

While it’s unclear when JHuang’s Eras Tour will kick off, such tech founder-branded merch is the latest fashion flex in the industry. Palantir sells a $75 tee with a watercolor-style portrait of CEO Alex Karp that reads “Dominate”—the perfect fit for both a UFC match and a Pentagon briefing. Anduril’s $79.99 Hawaiian shirts inspired by founder Palmer Luckey’s typical sartorial tastes are now sold out, according to the Wall Street Journal.

These tech bros are trading in their Patagonia vests to wear the literal likeness of tech leaders on their bodies. As one fan said in the Palantir subreddit: “People say we’re a cult so we should just embrace it.” To some, these Silicon Valley founders are bosses, industry titans, and public figures who wield a lot of power and influence. To others, they’re the equivalent of BTS. —WK

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