Four dropouts built Cursor’s parent company Anysphere:At 25, Truell lands a business deal with SpaceX

Michael Truel prefers coding away from the limelight. He hasn’t been interested in salary. But at just 25 years of age, his company Cursor is at the center of the biggest deal in the developer tools segment. SpaceX has announced its acquisition for $60 billion (₹5.6 lakh crore). Born in New York, Truel started coding at age 11, went to MIT after Horace Mann School, and interned at Google on language models at age 18. In 2022, he dropped out and created Anysphere with three MIT classmates – Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark, which is Cursor’s parent company. Initially, the company tried various ideas, but eventually the bet on AI-based coding tools proved right. Launched in 2023, Cursor helps developers write, edit, and debug code. By the end of 2025, Forbes valued it at around ₹2.8 lakh crore. Along with giants like OpenAI-Anthropic, it has become a key player in the ‘AI coding’ segment. Despite success, Truell is considered a person who speaks less and stays away from the public. In the early years, he didn’t even take a salary, maintained a strict hiring policy for a small, select team, and always aimed to build a ‘generational company’. However, after the deal on Tuesday, Anysphere will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX. The deal could be completed by the third quarter. According to TechCrunch, SpaceX previously had the option to either buy Cursor for $60 billion or continue the partnership by paying $10 billion. This deal, which happened a few days after the IPO, is being seen as an attempt to strengthen xAI.
According to Business Insider, Cursor had built its own ‘Composer’ model series to reduce dependence on third parties, but these require massive computing power to run. This is why SpaceX’s ‘Colossus’ infrastructure became a key reason for this deal. For Truell, this is a journey from teenage coder to billionaire founder, and for SpaceX, it’s an attempt to close the gap with AI giants. Truell started working on AI from the age of 18
2022 – Left MIT, founded his own company Anysphere with three partners.
2023 – Launched Cursor, revenue crossed $100 million in just 1 year.
2025 – Valuation $30 billion, revenue crossed $1 billion.
2026 – At the age of 25, made a big deal worth $60 billion with SpaceX.