Google Paid $2.4B for Windsurf. Why Did Musk Pay $60B for Cursor?
Last Updated on June 22, 2026 by Editorial Team
Author(s): Abhinav Gupta
Originally published on Towards AI.
Two of the most-loved coding tools on earth got absorbed by mega-corps in twelve months. One by Google. One by SpaceX.
#1 Start with Google. It paid $2.4 billion for Windsurf in July 2025 and walked away without the product. What it actually bought was the team.
The article contrasts Google’s $2.4B “reverse acquihire” of the Windsurf team—where product and customers went elsewhere—with SpaceX’s $60B all-stock purchase of Cursor/Anysphere, positioning both deals as bets on different layers of AI coding: Google bought the “harness” (the platform/team that makes tools work), while SpaceX bought distribution—Cursor’s large user base and workflow penetration. It argues that modern coding assistants converge on the same underlying wrapper (memory, tool systems, agent orchestration, and codebase awareness), making the model relatively interchangeable and the harness plus users the real value. It further supports this with adoption and pricing examples (Google’s Antigravity shipped with low early adoption and later bundled/credit-based constraints), claiming model-vendor control of the IDE/harness can funnel developers into a single ecosystem via defaults and quotas.
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