Who is Michael Truell, the 25-year-old founder whose AI startup SpaceX acquired for $60 billion?
“It all started from a place of ‘solution in search of a problem,'” Michael Truell, Cursor’s 25-year-old co-founder and CEO, said of the AI coding initiative.
With SpaceX officially acquiring Cursor, one of the most popular AI-powered coding tools on the market, in an stock deal that values the company at $60 billion, Truell is now one of the youngest self-made billionaires of the AI era.
Truell owns Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, along with three other MIT classmates, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger.
SpaceX Cursor deal
The co-founders each own a roughly 9% stake in San Francisco-based Anysphere (as the company is formally known), worth $5.5 billion per person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
They will receive SpaceX shares of equivalent value when the deal is completed, which is expected to occur in the third quarter of this year. The four co-founders, all in their mid-20s, join the growing list of billionaires Elon Musk has created since Space Exploration Technologies Corp. went public on Friday.
Why is SpaceX interested in Cursor?
Cursor said its products are used by 64% of Fortune 500 companies and its tools write more than 100 million lines of code per day for enterprise customers.
In April, SpaceX announced that it had reached a deal offering an option to buy Cursor for $60 billion, but chose to delay the official purchase until after the IPO to minimize disruption and avoid extra paperwork.
The deal represented a premium over the $50 billion valuation Cursor had recently raised in a financing round, Bloomberg reported in April. It also came with a $10 billion breakup fee if the acquisition didn’t go through.
SpaceX’s management has framed the acquisition as central to expanding its AI capabilities following its February merger with Musk’s AI startup xAI.
“Cursor has its own models and we can learn from them,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in an interview with CNBC on Friday. “We will cooperate closely. We think this makes a lot of sense.”
About Michael Truell
Michael Truell, a New York City native, was an undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
According to a Fortune report, Truell taught himself to code when he was just 11 years old to create mobile games. During his first year at MIT, he reportedly completed an hour-long coding challenge in less than ten minutes.
At age 18, Truell interned at Google, where he worked on machine learning language models used in content ranking.
He and partners Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger founded Cursor in 2022, initially focused on building an AI co-pilot for the mechanical engineering industry. This despite the fact that neither of them had a formal engineering background.
Sanger, a member of MIT’s squash team, interned at Bridgewater Associates. Lunnemark, who won a gold medal at the mathematics Olympics in his native Sweden, worked briefly as a quantity trader on Jane Street.
“We were very unfamiliar with this space,” Truell said in a May 2025 podcast appearance. “So there was a bit of a blind man and elephant problem from the very beginning.”
After a few months, they turned to developing an AI coding agent that would better fit the founding team’s background. In 2023, the OpenAI Startup Fund backed the fledgling firm in an $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.
As of January 2025, Cursor’s annual recurring revenue reached $100 million. Within two months, this figure doubled to one million daily users.
