SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share on June 11, raising approximately $75 billion across 555 million Class A shares, per the company's announcement. The Nasdaq debut on June 12 opened at $150 and closed at $160.95, up 19.2%, per TechCrunch. The print eclipsed Saudi Aramco's 2019 debut as the largest IPO in history. On June 16, SpaceX announced a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, the maker of AI coding tool Cursor, per CNBC.
The number that frames the move is the time between the two events: five trading days. Most newly public companies sit on their IPO stock for at least a quarter before deploying it in M&A. SpaceX used the freshly public paper as currency for a $60 billion all-stock transaction on day five. That requires two things to be true: the board pre-aligned on Cursor before the IPO priced, and the acquisition option Musk negotiated in April (per Bloomberg, $10 billion for a partnership or $60 billion for full acquisition) was always structured to fire post-listing.
The strategic read is that the IPO was the funding event for the Cursor deal, with the rocket and Starlink business serving as the credible balance sheet that supports the multiple. Cursor brought roughly $2.6 billion in annualized revenue to the deal, putting the acquisition at about 23x sales. That is a high multiple for a four-year-old company, but it is in the range the public market is paying for AI coding tools given GitHub Copilot's integration story, Cursor's enterprise ramp, and the broader autocomplete-to-agent transition. For SPCX shareholders the question is whether AI coding gets credit as a SpaceX business segment, or whether the market reads it as a distraction from the rocket and connectivity story.
Bottom Line
SpaceX raised public-market currency on day one and spent it on day five, which is the cleanest signal that the IPO existed to fund this acquisition. Watch the next earnings call for how management frames Cursor as a segment, since that framing sets the multiple from here.