The Deal That Shook Silicon Valley
SpaceX has formally agreed to acquire Anysphere Inc., the parent company of AI coding tool Cursor, for $60 billion — one of the most staggering buyouts in tech history. According to an SEC filing, Anysphere will become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Elon Musk-led rocket company, with the deal expected to close by the third quarter of 2026. The acquisition gives SpaceX — and its AI venture xAI — an instant foothold in the coding race against rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, while Cursor gains access to the massive compute infrastructure it needs to compete at the frontier of AI models.
The Company: From Obsession to Empire
Cursor was born in 2022 when four MIT students became obsessed with Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot and convinced they could build something better. Within three years, their product had become the AI coding tool of choice for millions of developers at more than 50,000 enterprises — including Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, Shopify and PayPal. The company crossed $1 billion in annualised revenue and, in 2025 alone, raised three funding rounds totalling $3.3 billion that catapulted its valuation from $2.5 billion to $29.3 billion in a single year.
Michael Truell: The CEO Who Coded at 11
Michael Truell, who grew up in New York City and attended the elite Horace Mann School in the Bronx, began coding at age 11 to build his own mobile games. By 18, he was interning at Google working on language models, where he caught the eye of Ali Partovi — an early investor in Facebook and Airbnb — by completing a written coding test in record time. Partovi, who later became one of Cursor’s first investors, reportedly put a star with a circle next to Truell’s name, signalling he would back any company Truell ever built. Forbes now estimates Truell’s net worth at $1.3 billion.
Aman Sanger: The 25-Year-Old Co-Founder
Aman Sanger, just 25 at the time of the deal, was raised in New York to a family with deep Indian roots. His father Arvind Sanger is an IIT Bombay alumnus and hedge fund professional; his mother Shilpa is an orthodontist, entrepreneur and board member of education non-profit Pratham USA. An avid squash player, Sanger began coding at 14, and his early passion for programming and artificial intelligence led him to MIT — where he met the three classmates who would become his co-founders and, ultimately, fellow billionaires.
Sualeh Asif
The other two co-founders bring equally remarkable backstories. Sualeh Asif, originally from Karachi, Pakistan, represented his country at the International Mathematics Olympiad from 2016 to 2018, and was building an AI-powered search engine in college before pivoting to Cursor.
Arvid Lunnemark
Arvid Lunnemark, from Sweden, is a former maths olympiad champion who completed internships in quantitative trading at Jane Street and software engineering at Stripe before co-founding the company. Lunnemark stepped back from Cursor in October 2025 to launch Integrous Research, a startup focused on building safer AI systems.
Why SpaceX Bought Cursor — and What Comes Next
The logic behind SpaceX’s decision is straightforward: xAI was falling behind in the coding race, and catching up organically could have taken years. Rather than build from scratch, SpaceX skipped the line. In April, it had given Cursor a choice — a $10 billion partnership agreement or a full acquisition at $60 billion. The founders chose the latter. For Cursor, the deal unlocks the compute resources needed to build and compete on frontier AI models. For SpaceX, it instantly owns the most widely used AI coding platform on the planet — a position that took four MIT students just three years to build.
