Cursor’s 25-year-old CEO, Michael Truell, helped take the AI programming company from a college passion project to a potential $60 billion acquisition by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
SpaceX announced in a post on X that Cursor has granted the company the right to acquire it later this year for US$60 billion. If SpaceX does not buy Cursor, it will pay US$10 billion for the joint work between the two, the company said.
Either way, it’s a big win for Truell, who, just a few years after dropping out of MIT, is worth an estimated $1.3 billion, according to Forbes. His and Cursor’s rapid rise is among Silicon Valley’s greatest success stories.
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Who is Michael Truell?
Truell grew up in New York City and attended the Horace Mann School, a private preparatory school in the Bronx. He has always been interested in technology and started programming at age 11 to create his own mobile games, he told Fortune journalist Allie Garfinkle.
At 18, Truell had just completed his freshman year at MIT and was doing a summer internship at Google. During this period, he worked with “language models for feed classification”, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Truell met Ali Partovi, an early investor in Facebook and Airbnb, during his internship when Partovi was recruiting for his Neo Scholars program, an accelerator for young technology talent.
Truell immediately impressed him by completing a written programming test “in record time,” Forbes reported.
After the meeting, Partovi placed a circled star next to Truell’s name on a list of potential Neo Scholars candidates, indicating that he “was so impressed that he would invest in any project Truell would develop,” according to Forbes.
Truell later became a Neo Scholar, one of only 30 selected each year. When he founded Cursor, Partovi became one of the company’s first investors.
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How Truell founded Cursor
Truell and his MIT colleagues Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark were already interested in AI before OpenAI transformed the industry by launching ChatGPT in 2022. A year earlier, Cursor’s co-founders were discussing what they should do in the AI space, Truell said in an interview at Y Combinator’s AI Startup School in San Francisco in June last year.
“In 2021, we were trying to figure out what to do with that interest,” he said. “Should we go and work on AI in academia? Or should we join some big existing effort in the field? Or do we create something of our own?”
In 2022, they found the answer. Truell and his co-founders became obsessed with Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which launched for individual developers that year. But the program had limitations, they realized, and could be improved.
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At first, the co-founders focused on what Truell described as a “Copilot for mechanical engineers,” in part because it would be a niche that was “underexplored and had low competition,” he said in the Y Combinator interview. Two of Truell’s co-founders were also working on a messaging encryption project at the time.
It wasn’t until about six months later that the team changed direction and began focusing on AI programming, something they had initially avoided “because we thought it was too competitive,” Truell said. But the group was under pressure after their first ideas didn’t take off.
Furthermore, “we realized that we were really excited about the future of programming,” he said in the Y Combinator interview.
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This motivation led Truell and his co-founders to one of the fastest growth trajectories in Silicon Valley startup history.
The company’s valuation has skyrocketed almost as quickly as AI capabilities have evolved. Cursor raised a seed round of US$60 million in June 2024. By the end of 2025, it had completed three more rounds of financing, totaling US$3.3 billion, increasing its valuation from US$2.5 billion to US$30 billion in just one year.
The company has grown even faster than some big tech names with similar rises.
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Slack took two and a half years to reach $100 million in annualized revenue, while Dropbox took four years to reach the same milestone.
Cursor reached $100 million in annualized revenue in January 2025, about a year and eight months after launching its first product in early 2023. Its annualized revenue surpassed $2 billion in February, according to Fortune.
Cursor is a programming assistant with its own integrated development environment, or IDE, where the company’s AI is already incorporated. At its most basic level, Cursor’s AI capabilities allow users to code faster by constantly predicting the code they are likely to write next.
With the launch of Cursor 3 earlier this month, the company has improved its “agentic” programming, in which AI can write code on its own with broad user guidance — a move to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which launched just over a year ago but has already gained popularity among programmers.
Cursor has more than 300 employees, and 67% of Fortune 500 companies use the company’s technology, Fortune reported. Among the well-known companies that use Cursor are Salesforce, Samsung and Budweiser, according to the company’s website.
Before SpaceX’s announcement, the company was in talks to raise another round of investment at a valuation of $50 billion, TechCrunch reported. Now, it can be acquired for US$10 billion more than that.
For comparison purposes, a year ago the company was negotiating to raise funds with a valuation close to US$10 billion, according to Bloomberg.
In the end, what may have made Cursor succeed where the founders’ other projects failed was a simple decision: go all in.
“We felt really strongly about it and we were really excited, so at some point we just decided to go all the way,” Truell said.
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