Critics of Elon Musk's latest SpaceX deal say Cursor is overvalued.

Elon Musk is making a career out of defying the market by making risky, outsized bets before the rest of the market wakes up and smells the coffee.

Musk is right so many times that arguing against him seems to become a folly in the current market. Tesla (TSLA) helped redefine the electric-vehicle market. SpaceX became the dominant force in commercial launches.

Following enormous successes in such disparate industries, it becomes harder and harder to bet against Musk, as he has a habit of proving critics wrong.

But not every new bet gets judged on vision alone.

As new deals are struck, critics will scrutinize price, timing, and whether the risk remains contained or starts to bleed into the rest of Musk's increasingly interconnected business empire. That is why a reported new deal involving SpaceX and AI coding startup Cursor is drawing so much attention.

SpaceX struck a deal, giving it the right to buy Cursor for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion to the company for the collaboration if a deal does not take place, The New York Times reported. The tieup also gives Cursor access to SpaceX's computing resources, including Colossus, the supercomputer connected to xAI.

On paper, the bet Musk is making appears sound. AI coding tools are one of the most important battlegrounds in artificial intelligence, and Cursor is certainly making a name for itself in this important area. Cursor said in November 2025 that it raised $2.3 billion in a Series D round at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation, CNBC noted.

With the amount of capital raised so far and the niche Cursor is serving, it comes as no surprise that Tesla would want a bigger piece of this pie.

Still, the reported terms also create an easy punching bag for critics.

SpaceX's Cursor deal could look too rich too fast

The first issue with the deal is valuation.

If SpaceX truly has a path to buy Cursor for $60 billion, that price tag would place the potential deal's valuation at more than double the startup's last disclosed valuation from just a few months ago. Even by the standards of the current AI boom, the deal is very aggressive.

Supporters can make a compelling case for it. The attraction is obvious. Cursor brings distribution among serious developers, while SpaceX and xAI bring vast computing power.

Let's say that the partnership works out; it could help Musk build a stronger answer to rivals such as Anthropic and OpenAI in one of AI's most dynamic enterprises.

But that does not mean investors will let go of the price.

The deal structure itself may lead to even more criticism. It's a kind of "try before you buy," which suggests that even those closest to the partnership feel some uncertainty about how much Cursor is really worth and whether the strategic upside will completely come to fruition.

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That generates a familiar tension in the Musk-verse. The deal adds to Musk's visionary reputation. But the price tag will deter most people. It may seem strategically urgent but also a matter of discipline.

And when those numbers get big enough, the market starts to wonder if ambition is outstripping the math. That is what makes this a unique growth story.

You've got a startup with a sky-high valuation, a reported $60 billion buyout option and $10 billion fallback payment, the sort of setup that almost begs the question of whether Musk is paying again for speed, relevance, and ecosystem control.

Tesla investors may see a familiar Elon Musk pattern in Cursor deal

The second issue is not just cost. It is overlap.

The Cursor tieup will rely on Colossus infrastructure connected to xAI, while SpaceX also explores a broader alliance involving Mistral and Cursor as Musk tries to take on top AI rivals.

In other words, this is not a neatly isolated bet. It sits inside a larger web of Musk-linked companies, shared resources, and overlapping ambitions.

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That may sound efficient to Tesla bulls. However, it might lead to something messy for other people.

Multiple Musk companies share compute, talent, and strategy, which leads critics to often ask the same question: Where does one company's interest end, and another's begin?

That question is becoming harder and harder to ignore as Tesla investors already digest Musk's AI ambitions. In July 2025, Reuters reported that Musk said Tesla shareholders would vote on whether Tesla should invest in xAI, even as a merger was ruled out.

Reuters later reported that Tesla had received multiple shareholder proposals related to that possible investment.

Now layer that onto Tesla's current spending picture.

Tesla plans to boost capital spending to more than $25 billion in 2026, mainly for artificial intelligence, Robotaxis, and humanoid robots, and expects to post negative free cash flow for the rest of the year, Reuters confirmed on April 23, 2026. The plan is already testing investor faith in unproven bets.

That context matters. Even if Tesla isn't directly buying Cursor, another giant Musk AI deal could still revive a familiar fear for shareholders: that ambitious empire-building gambits have a tendency to come back to haunt Tesla, through distraction, governance worries, or pressure to prop up the wider ecosystem.

Photo by Josh Edelson on Getty Images

Why Elon Musk's Cursor bet could draw easy criticism

The best defense of the deal is straightforward: Cursor is growing rapidly, coding AI is strategically critical, and Musk has every incentive to pursue stronger products if he wants xAI to catch up with competitors. It's not a difficult logic to understand.

But the criticism is just as easy to map out.

Key risks critics could point to

• Valuation risk: A reported $60 billion buy option far exceeds Cursor's last disclosed $29.3 billion valuation, according to Investopedia.
• Execution risk: A "try before you buy" structure will make investors believe that the upside is just not there for the investors.
• Governance risk: The deeper the links among SpaceX, xAI, and possibly Tesla, the more under the scanner everything will become.
• Tesla spillover risk: Tesla is already increasing spending on unproven AI projects, and shareholders may be less tolerant of another giant Musk-adjacent bet.

That is why this story could resonate beyond SpaceX.

For bulls, it's a potentially smart move to lock in talent, processing power, and product momentum in one of AI's hottest segments. To skeptics, it might seem like something else: yet another richly priced Musk gamble in which investors are asked to buy into the grand plan before the economics are fully visible.

And that is where the headline risk exists.

If the partnership works, Musk will look brilliant again. If it stumbles, critics will have a good and easy target: The price looked inflated, the empire overlap looked messy, and the warning signs were there from the beginning.

In that sense, this is not just a Cursor story.

It's a story about whether investors still want to keep underwriting Musk's next big idea when the numbers are huge and the structures are complicated, and Tesla is already asking the market for patience on expensive bets of its own.

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This story was originally published April 26, 2026 at 8:01 PM.