SpaceX’s stunning IPO pop has driven Elon Musk’s net worth to astronomical levels. It’s also given him an extraordinary business tool: a supercurrency for mergers and acquisitions.
Musk demonstrated the power of that currency on Tuesday when SpaceX announced its acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion in stock. Some say the deal may be the largest ever acquisition of a venture-backed startup. While SpaceX and Cursor had announced a deal in April that gave SpaceX a call option to buy the startup after the IPO for $60 billion in stock, Wall Street’s appetite for SpaceX stock has transformed the economics of the deal for Musk.
In theory, the deal has cost Musk almost nothing.
SpaceX is paying for Cursor entirely in stock—and that stock has appreciated by several times the initial price of the deal. SpaceX opened at $135 per share on June 12 and closed Monday at $192.46, giving SpaceX a market cap of $2.51 trillion—up roughly $740 billion from its IPO valuation in less than four trading days. The $60 billion Cursor acquisition represents less than a tenth of that gain.
In fact, SpaceX’s stock appreciated by the entire cost of Cursor in a matter of hours on its first day of trading.
