This 25-year-old sold his AI start-up to Musk for $60B
What's the story
Michael Truell, a 25-year-old co-founder and CEO of Cursor, an AI coding start-up, has become one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the artificial intelligence era. Elon Musk-led SpaceX recently acquired Cursor for a whopping $60 billion in an all-stock deal. The acquisition is one of the fastest and most remarkable success stories in Silicon Valley history.
Deal details
SpaceX acquires Cursor to boost its AI ambitions
The acquisition deal was announced on June 16, 2026. Under the terms, Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX. The transaction stems from a strategic partnership signed in April 2026 that gave SpaceX the option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion or pay a $10 billion collaboration fee. Elon Musk's aerospace company chose the acquisition route to bolster its AI ambitions through its sister company xAI.
Rise to fame
Truell's early career and pivotal connections
Truell's journey in the tech world started early. He interned at Google after his first year at MIT. During this time, he met Ali Partovi, an early investor in Facebook and Airbnb. Impressed by Truell's performance on a written coding test, Partovi invited him to join Neo Scholars program, an accelerator for promising young tech talent.
Start-up launch
Origin story of Cursor
In 2022, Truell and his MIT classmates Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark founded Anysphere, which later developed Cursor. Interestingly, the team didn't initially plan to create Cursor but an AI assistant for mechanical engineers. They later shifted their focus to software development as they thought their programming skills would give them a competitive edge.
Business boom
Cursor's meteoric rise to success
Launched in 2023, Cursor quickly became one of the fastest-growing software start-ups globally. The AI-powered coding assistant streamlines code generation, editing, and debugging for developers. It gained widespread adoption across enterprises with thousands of teams and major corporations using it. Backed by investors such as the OpenAI Startup Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, Cursor continued to grow at an extraordinary pace.
Revenue growth
Impressive growth and widespread adoption of Cursor
Cursor crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in January 2025, about 20 months after launching its first product. By early 2026, annualized revenue had surpassed $2 billion, while reports suggest annual recurring revenue approached $3 billion by mid-2026. Despite a small workforce of only a few hundred people, Cursor became a widely adopted enterprise tool used by a majority of Fortune 500 companies, including NVIDIA, Adobe, Salesforce, Samsung and more.