Just days after the biggest stock-market debut in history, SpaceX opened its chequebook - and wide. Elon Musk's company will buy the AI-coding startup Cursor for 60 billion dollars (about 55 billion euros) in shares. The deal comes less than two months after the two companies announced a partnership, and is set to close by the third quarter of 2026.

The figure is almost double what Cursor was worth recently - around 29 billion dollars. The startup, founded in 2022 under the name Anysphere, was just preparing to close a 2-billion-dollar round with investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and Nvidia, which would have valued it at 50 billion. Musk intercepted the whole story with an offer Cursor couldn't refuse: either an acquisition for 60 billion, or a 10-billion penalty if the deal fell through. That's what it looks like when someone with a trillion in fresh cash on hand decides they want something.

Behind the number-crunching theatre lies a different reality. The purchase is meant to bolster SpaceX's AI division, built around xAI - the company that integrated last year and then practically fell apart. All 11 co-founders Musk brought into xAI had left by the end of March, and Musk himself admitted the firm "wasn't built right the first time" and is being rebuilt from the ground up. Among the scandals were the chatbot Grok calling itself "MechaHitler" and tools that allowed the creation of non-consensual fake sexual images - problems SpaceX openly warned investors carry legal and business risk.

Still, investors were sold a dream with enormous numbers: a total market of 28 trillion dollars, of which a full 26 trillion is around artificial intelligence. Now Cursor has to deliver on that promise. And the maths here turns absurd - since going public on Friday, SpaceX's stock jumped from 135 to over 200 dollars, adding nearly a trillion dollars in value in a few days. That is, by the company's own reckoning, about 16 Cursors. When a 60-billion acquisition looks like loose change, the question isn't how much the startup is worth, but how much the numbers on this market mean at all.