Today SpaceX is picking up the Cursor code editor for $60 billion. The aerospace company needs coding capabilities for Grok. xAI merged into SpaceX back in February, and buying Cursor hands it a ready-made product and data pipeline in exactly the area where Grok still trails Claude Code.
SpaceX is paying for Cursor with stock it issued last week at IPO. And this isn't even the biggest deal in history. The all-time record acquisition — the February xAI deal at $250 billion — also went through as a share swap. The assets basically just moved around inside one ecosystem. From one of Musk's pockets to another.
DeepSeek's first outside money
Also today, DeepSeek closed a $7.4 billion round at a valuation north of $50 billion — the Chinese AI lab's first outside funding. Investors including Tencent handed over cash with no voting rights and a five-year lockup on selling their stakes.
Deals with actual cash
There have been some deals with actual liquidity lately too. These are M&A between independent companies, paid in real money, with valuations backed by actual cash:
- [Google paid $32 billion cash for Wiz](https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/google-32-billion-acquisition-wiz/814437/) (an Israeli cloud security startup). The fun detail: a year ago Wiz turned down Google's $23 billion offer. Turns out that was the right call.
- Salesforce bought Fin (ex-Intercom) for $3.6 billion. The biggest player in the enterprise support-agent market. Their product is genuinely impressive for large companies. But the pricing is absolutely brutal. So there's room — and money — for a lot of competition in this space.
Not sure why I listed all this. Probably just noticed that the industry is printing record numbers in dollar terms. The zeros in the reports are real, but the biggest figures almost always turn out to be paper. Meaning there's basically no actual cash — in the startups themselves or in their valuations. It's always stock, or infrastructure, or multi-year component supply commitments.