On 21 April, big news caught the startup world’s attention again when SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace company and the world’s richest billionaire, announced that Cursor, an AI coding startup, granted SpaceX—which now includes xAI—the option to acquire the company at a valuation potentially reaching $60 billion (over 1.9 trillion baht).
SpaceX explained in a post on X that “SpaceXAI and Cursor are working closely to develop the world’s best AI for coding and knowledge work,” marking another step for SpaceX to boost its competitiveness against rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic in the AI arena, where SpaceX still trails behind.
What makes this deal intriguing is why SpaceX is willing to pay such a massive sum for a startup only a few years old. What is so special about Cursor?
Another point of interest is the new billionaire behind it all: 25-year-old Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO, whose brilliance has made Cursor an AI startup highly sought after by big tech. Founded in 2022, Cursor rapidly grew to a valuation exceeding $30 billion, and if the deal with SpaceX closes, it will surpass $50 billion.
This article from Thairath Money’s columnHow to Make Moneyintroduces the young genius behind Cursor’s rapid growth. Michael Truell entered MIT at just 17, but his talent led him to drop out of academia to create his own startup, which is now nearing an exit and has made him a billionaire with a net worth over $13 billion.
Michael Truell grew up in New York City, USA. During his school years, he attended Horace Mann School, a prestigious private school in the Bronx known for sending many students to Ivy League universities. Truell had been interested in technology since childhood and began coding at age 11 to create his own mobile games, as he told Fortune.
By age 17, according to hisLinkedInprofile, he joined a summer research program at MIT in 2017 focusing on AI and statistics. He told Fortune he has long been passionate about numbers, statistics, and AI, pursuing these fields seriously.
After completing his first year at MIT, at 18 he interned at Google, working on language models for feed ranking systems.
During his internship, Truell met Ali Partovi, an early investor in Facebook and Airbnb, who was selecting candidates for Neo Scholars, a program nurturing new tech talent. Truell impressed by setting a record for speed on a coding test.
Partovi marked Truell’s name with a star in the applicant list, meaning he was "very impressed and ready to invest in any project Truell undertakes." Truell was accepted as a Neo Scholar, one of only 30 chosen annually. When he founded Cursor, Partovi became one of its first investors.
While studying at MIT, Truell teamed up with classmates Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark, all interested in AI even before OpenAI’s ChatGPT disrupted the industry in 2022.
In 2021, the co-founders debated how to pursue AI, Truell told Y Combinator in June last year—the same year he left MIT’s math and computer science program to focus on Cursor.
“In 2021, we were trying to decide what to do with this interest,” he said. “Should we pursue AI academically? Join a big AI team? Or build something ourselves?”
By 2022, the four found their answer. Fascinated by Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot launched that year, they saw its limitations and believed they could build something better.
Initially, the founders focused on creating a Copilot for mechanical engineers, seeing it as a niche market with less competition. But after about six months, they pivoted fully to AI coding, though Truell admitted they initially avoided this crowded field.
After several ideas failed, the team made a key decision: “We realized we were truly excited about the future of coding,” he said. They fully committed to making Cursor an AI coding startup.
That passion became the driving force behind Cursor’s rapid rise, making it one of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing startups, with valuation surging nearly in step with AI technology advances.
Cursor raised $60 million in its first funding round in June 2024, then secured three more rounds within 2025, totaling $3.3 billion. Its valuation jumped from $2.5 billion to $30 billion in just one year.
Cursor’s growth outpaced many famous tech companies. For example, Slack took about two and a half years to reach $100 million in annual revenue, and Dropbox took four years.
Cursor achieved $100 million in annual revenue in January 2025, only about 1 year and 8 months after launching its first product in early 2023. By February, its annual revenue exceeded $2 billion, according to Fortune.
Cursor is a coding assistant integrated with its own IDE (Integrated Development Environment), with AI at its core to help users code faster by predicting what they are likely to write next.
Recently, with the launch of Cursor 3, the company advanced to Agentic Coding, where AI can write code autonomously under broad user instructions, positioning it to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code, launched a year earlier but quickly popular among developers.
Cursor now employs over 300 people and serves 67% of Fortune 500 companies. Its clients include global leaders like Salesforce, Samsung, and Budweiser.
Michael Truell, as CEO and co-founder, has benefited from Cursor’s growth, becoming a billionaire at just 25 years old with a net worth exceeding $1.3 billion as of November 2025, according to Forbes.
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