Everyone is talking about SpaceX and its bid to acquire Cursor, the artificial intelligence coding assistant . But fewer people are asking who made SpaceX's $60 billion deal possible in the first place.

Michael Truell is a 25-year-old former Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) dropout and former Google intern who is the current CEO and co-founded Cursor, an artificial intelligence (AI) coding assistant that Elon Musk's SpaceX has agreed to acquire for $60 billion.

Without Truell and his college classmates deciding, in 2021, to take a bet on AI coding, there would be no Cursor today. There would be no deal to announce and definitely no headline to run on different platforms.

On Tuesday, SpaceX announced via a post on X that Cursor had granted SpaceX the right to acquire the company later this year.

If the acquisition doesn't go through, SpaceX will pay $10 billion for their collaboration. Either way, it's the kind of outcome most founders spend entire careers chasing.

Truell is now worth an estimated $1.3 billion, according to Forbes. But the number that matters more is this: 67% of Fortune 500 companies currently use Cursor's technology.

That didn't happen because SpaceX wrote a cheque. It happened because a 21-year-old and his friends decided to go all in.

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 started coding at 11, motivated not by ambition but by a simple desire to build his own mobile games.

By 18, he was completing his first year at MIT and spending the summer as an intern at Google, where he worked on language models for feed ranking.

That internship put him in the same room as Ali Partovi, an early investor in Facebook and Airbnb who was recruiting for his Neo Scholars programme, an accelerator for young technical talent.

Truell completed a written coding test faster than any candidate before him. Partovi marked his name with a starred circle, a personal shorthand meaning he'd back whatever Truell built next.

Truell later became one of only 30 Neo Scholars selected that year, and when Cursor launched, Partovi was among its first investors.

How Truell Founded Cursor

The origin of Cursor predates most of the AI conversation happening today. In 2021, a full year before OpenAI launched ChatGPT and rewired the industry.

Truell and his MIT classmates Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark were already asking the question of what they were actually going to do with their interest in AI.

Their first attempts didn't land, a copilot tool for mechanical engineers, a message encryption project, but failure for them clarified things.

AI coding was the space they kept gravitating to, even though they'd initially avoided it for being too competitive. What changed their minds was Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, which launched for individual developers in 2022.

The four co-founders found it impressive but limited. They believed they could build something better. More importantly, they realised they were genuinely excited about the future of coding, not just its commercial potential, but the craft of it. That excitement became the engine of what we know as Cursor today.

Cursor's first product launched in early 2023 under Anysphere, Inc. an American software company. By January 2025, it had crossed $100 million in annualised revenue.

The company raised $60 million in June 2024, then three further rounds that pushed its valuation from $2.5 billion to $30 billion within a single year.

Cursor Inking A $60 Billion Deal With SpaceX: Cursor's Worth

Cursor is now more than a coding assistant. It's a full integrated development environment (IDE) with AI built directly into the workflow. The platform predicts the code a developer is likely to write next, reducing friction and accelerating output.

With the launch of Cursor 3 earlier this month, the company pushed further into agentic coding, where AI can generate code independently with broad user direction, putting it in direct competition with Anthropic's Claude Code.

The company employs more than 300 people. Salesforce, Samsung, and Budweiser are among its clients. Before the SpaceX announcement, Cursor was reportedly in talks to raise a new round at a $50 billion valuation.

The acquisition price of $60 billion landed $10 billion above that. A year ago, the same company was being discussed at a $10 billion valuation.

The trajectory is difficult to overstate. But it traces back to a single decision Truell and his co-founders made when their earlier ideas weren't working, not to pivot cautiously, but to go all in on what they actually cared about.