“It started from a very ‘solution-in-search-of-a-problem’ place,” Michael Truell, the 25-year-old co-founder and CEO of Cursor, said about his AI coding startup.
With SpaceX formally buying Cursor, one of the most popular AI-powered coding tools on the market, in an all-stock deal that values the company at $60 billion, Truell is now one of the youngest self-made billionaires of the artificial intelligence era.
Truell owns Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, with his three other MIT classmates — Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger.
The SpaceX Cursor deal
Each of the co-founders owns about a 9% stake in San Francisco-based Anysphere, as the firm is formally known, worth $5.5 billion apiece, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
When the deal closes, which is expected in the third quarter of this year, they’ll receive SpaceX shares of equivalent value. The four co-founders, all in their mid-20s, join a growing list of billionaires minted by Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. since it went public on Friday.
Why is SpaceX interested in Cursor?
Cursor said its products are used by 64% of Fortune 500 companies, and that its tools write more than 100 million lines of code a day for enterprise customers.
In April, SpaceX announced that it had reached an agreement giving it the option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion, but elected to defer the formal acquisition until after its IPO to minimise disruptions and avoid extra paperwork.
The deal represented a premium over the $50 billion valuation Cursor had recently floated in a funding round, Bloomberg reported in April. It also came with a $10 billion breakup fee should the purchase fall through.
SpaceX’s management has framed the acquisition as central to expanding its AI capabilities following its February merger with Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup, xAI.
“Cursor has their own models, I think, and we can learn from them,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said Friday in an interview with CNBC. “We’re going to collaborate closely. We think this makes a huge amount of sense.”
About Michael Truell
Michael Truell, a New York City native, was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
According to a Fortune report, Truell taught himself to code at just 11 years old to build mobile games. During his first year at MIT, he reportedly completed a coding challenge designed to take an hour in less than ten minutes.
At 18, Truell interned at Google, where he worked on machine-learning language models used for content ranking.
He and his partners — Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger — founded Cursor in 2022, initially focusing on building an AI copilot for the mechanical engineering industry. This is despite the fact that none of them had a formal engineering background.
Sanger, a member of MIT’s squash team, interned at Bridgewater Associates. Lunnemark, a math olympiad gold medalist in his native Sweden, worked briefly as a quant trader for Jane Street.
“We were very much unfamiliar with the field,” Truell said in a May 2025 podcast appearance. “So there was a little bit of a blind man and the elephant problem from the get-go.”
After a few months, they pivoted to developing an AI coding agent that better aligned with the founding team’s background. In 2023, the OpenAI Startup Fund backed the fledgling firm in a $8 million seed round, according to PitchBook data.
The following year, Anysphere raised $60 million in a Series A round, valuing the company at $400 million. Major investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Dorm Room Fund and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison.
By January 2025, Cursor had hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Within two months, that figure had doubled, reaching a million daily users.
(With Bloomberg inputs)
