SpaceX’s surging stock just turned its valuation into an acquisition weapon

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on 12 June. Five days later, the stock has climbed nearly 50%, pushing SpaceX past Amazon to become the fifth most valuable public company in the world at roughly $2.66 trillion.

That surge is not just making shareholders richer. It is making acquisitions cheaper.

On Monday, SpaceX confirmed it would acquire Cursor, the AI coding startup, for $60 billion in an all-stock transaction. The deal, first agreed in April, gave SpaceX 30 days after its IPO to finalise the terms.

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It took three. Because SpaceX is paying entirely in stock, every percentage point the share price climbs reduces the number of shares it needs to hand over.

The final share count will not be set until just before closing, expected in the third quarter. But if the stock stays at current levels, SpaceX will issue roughly a third fewer shares than it would have at the IPO price.

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman spotted the dynamic immediately. “The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX’s high valuation,” he wrote on X, adding that SpaceX’s ability to do “economically, strategically, and technologically accretive acquisitions” is a core part of its value.

Critics had questioned whether SpaceX’s valuation was justified heading into its IPO. The counterargument is that sheer size, when paired with rising stock, is itself a strategic asset.

Cursor is not a speculative bet. The AI coding tool reached $2 billion in annual recurring revenue in roughly three years, the fastest business-to-business scaling on record, with more than one million paying customers and 70% of the Fortune 1,000 in its base.

Founded by four MIT classmates including 25-year-old CEO Michael Truell, Cursor helped spark the “vibe coding” trend, in which developers describe what they want and AI agents write the code. The acquisition will fold into xAI, the artificial intelligence company SpaceX absorbed in a $1.25 trillion all-stock merger in February.

SpaceX’s stock rose after the Cursor announcement on Monday, the opposite of what typically happens to an acquiring company’s share price. The market, it appears, sees the deal as accretive rather than dilutive.

SpaceX is not the only company eyeing this playbook. Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO on 1 June at a valuation approaching $965 billion, and OpenAI followed a week later.

Both companies are sitting on enormous private valuations but lack the liquid stock that would let them d