Cursor’s chief executive, Michael Truell, is suddenly at the center of a $60 billion deal after SpaceX said Tuesday that Cursor had given it the right to acquire the company later this year. If SpaceX does not buy Cursor, the company will pay $10 billion for their work together, according to the announcement made on X.
Truell, 30, dropped out of MIT a few years before the agreement and has built a fortune estimated by Forbes at $1.3 billion. He grew up in New York City, attended the Horace Mann School in the Bronx and started coding at age 11, making his own mobile games before his career moved from curiosity to conviction.
That path began long before Cursor became a name in AI coding. In 2021, Truell said he and cofounders Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark were still trying to figure out what to do with their interest in AI. He said the group was debating whether to work on AI in academia, join a large existing effort or start something of their own. By 2022, they were focused on Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, and about six months later Cursor had pivoted into AI coding after first aiming at a copilot for mechanical engineers.
Truell’s own route into the field ran through MIT and Google. At 18, after finishing his first year at MIT, he spent a summer internship at Google working on language models for feed ranking, where he met Ali Partovi, who later became one of Cursor’s first investors. He later became a Neo Scholar, and Cursor’s rise has unfolded alongside the broader boom in AI coding tools, a market that Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot helped define.
The friction in the story is that Cursor’s leap came after the company nearly stayed small. Truell described the original mechanical-engineering focus as “sleepy and uncompetitive,” saying the team moved away from it “because we thought it was too competitive,” only to realize later that they were “really inherently excited about the future of coding.” That pivot, more than any single funding round, is what turned a college passion project into a company now negotiating from a position few startups ever reach.
What happens next is straightforward and consequential: SpaceX either closes the acquisition later this year or pays Cursor $10 billion for the work it has done with the company. Either outcome puts Truell’s once-scrappy startup at the center of one of the largest valuations ever attached to an AI coding company.
