Elon Musk bought Anysphere — the developer of Cursor, a popular AI coding tool — for $60 billion, using SpaceX shares . The deal closed just days before Anthropic's stock market debut. According to an author named Ricardo (the owner of a content agency for founders in finance and technology), this strikes at one of the key revenue sources for Anthropic.

The thing is, Cursor ran on Claude models: every engineer who wrote code through the platform was essentially a paying Anthropic customer «under the hood». The tool is used by a significant part of Silicon Valley and many engineering teams from the Fortune 500 list. The flagship Composer feature became one of the most beloved AI products for programmers — precisely thanks to Claude.

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Why Cursor mattered to Anthropic

According to Ricardo, the very notion of the term «vibe coding» is tied to Cursor and Claude — it is a colloquial label for the approach in which you describe a task to a programmer in plain words and the AI writes the code. The term came into use in early 2025 among researchers who were experimenting with Composer based on Claude Sonnet.

The connection turned out to be deep, and financial too. As the author notes, Anthropic's corporate revenue surged in 2025 partly because every engineer who used Cursor was essentially a paying Anthropic customer «under the hood». Cursor became one of the largest internal channels of Claude usage across the entire internet.

The most painful part, Ricardo stresses, is exactly how the payment was made. «Not a single dollar in cash changed hands»: all $60 billion was paid in SpaceX shares. The deal was formalized through a regulatory 8-K filing, and Musk exercised an option he had signed back in April.

Source: BeInCrypto