OpenAI drops a billion-dollar customer to avoid working with Musk

OpenAI said over the weekend it is cutting ties with Cursor, one of the most popular coding tools on the market, after SpaceX acquired the startup for $60 billion. The stated reason: the company does not trust Elon Musk to honor its terms of service.

The numbers show what OpenAI is willing to forfeit. According to people familiar with the matter, Cursor ranked among OpenAI's top five revenue customers in early 2026 and was on track to generate more than $1 billion a year on an annualized basis by this spring. OpenAI declined to comment; representatives for SpaceX and Cursor did not respond to requests from WIRED.

In a blog post, OpenAI explained the move by saying it "cannot be certain that SpaceX will use our technology within the bounds of our terms of service, based on our experience with Musk-led companies breaching contracts." The decision comes as OpenAI prepares for a public offering next year and tries to present investors with a steadier business — one not reliant on Musk's goodwill. The company now reports more than $40 billion in annual revenue from subscriptions, ChatGPT advertising, and sales of access to its coding tool, Codex.

Michael Truell, Cursor's founder and chief executive, who now leads teams at SpaceX, pushed back quickly on X. He claimed OpenAI models serve "only about 5% of Cursor's user traffic," implying the split will not materially hurt his business. Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI's head of core products, replied that token usage "is not a measure of revenue or value created" and asked Truell to "share the math" behind the figure.

The relationship was already complicated. WIRED previously reported that Cursor's leadership hoped to remain a platform for third-party models — both OpenAI's and Anthropic's — after the acquisition. Industry observers considered that wishful thinking, assuming a breakup was only a matter of time. OpenAI has been building Codex into a larger, increasingly competitive coding business, yet the two companies operated quietly as both partners and rivals for more than a year.

That arrangement became untenable with Musk in control. OpenAI apparently decided the partnership was not worth the risk that SpaceX would distill its most advanced models. The blog post noted that Musk hinted during testimony in his lawsuit against OpenAI earlier this year that xAI, now part of SpaceX, had used OpenAI models to train its own. A federal jury dismissed that lawsuit earlier this year.