SpaceX Cursor deal mints 4 multibillionaires in their mid-20s

SpaceX agreed to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion in an all-stock deal, minting four MIT classmates in their mid-20s as multibillionaires. Each co-founder owns about 9% of Cursor, worth $5.5 billion, as the deal underscores AI's role in creating young tech billionaires.

Getting your Trinity Audio //trinityaudio.ai player ready...By Dylan Sloan , Bloomberg Around the time ChatGPT and Github’s Copilot brought AI to the masses, four MIT classmates with backgrounds in computer science and finance decided they wanted in. They just didn’t quite know how. “It started from a very ‘solution-in-search-of-a-problem’ place,” Michael Truell, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cursor, the San Francisco-based company they started together, said in a June 2025 podcast appearance. Four years later, Cursor is one of the most popular AI-powered coding tools on the market — and their “solution” has made them all multibillionaires. SpaceX formally agreed Tuesday to buy Cursor in an all-stock deal that values the company at $60 billion. Each of the co-founders owns about a 9% stake in the company — formally known as Anysphere — worth $5.5 billion apiece, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. When the deal closes, which is expected to be in the third quarter of this year, they’ll receive SpaceX shares of equivalent value. The four principals — all in their mid-20s — join a growing list of billionaires minted by Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. since it went public on Friday. Their story is also emblematic of the changing path to 10-figure wealth for young founders: AI mania and surging venture-capital spending mean new billionaires are increasingly coming out of the tech sector, rather than finance. A spokesperson for Cursor didn’t respond to a request for comment. Truell and his future partners — Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger — were all undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Truell, a New York City native, interned at Google, while Sanger, a member of MIT’s squash team, interned at Bridgewater Associates. Lunnemark, a math olympiad gold medalist in his native Sweden, worked briefly as a quant trader for Jane Street. The four founded Cursor in 2022, initially focusing on building an AI copilot for the mechanical engineering industry. This despite the fact that none of them had a formal engineering background. “We were very much unfamiliar with the field,” Truell said in a May 2025 podcast appearance. “So there was a little bit of a blind man and the elephant problem from the get-go.” After a few months, they pivoted to developing an AI coding agent more in line with the founding team’s background. In 2023, the OpenAI Startup Fund backed the fledgling firm in a seed round that raised $8 million, according to Pitchbook data. The following year, Anysphere raised $60 million in a Series A round valuing the company at $400 million. Major investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Dorm Room Fund and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison. By January 2025, Cursor had hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Within two months, that figure had doubled, and it hit a million daily users. Even as larger players including OpenAI and Anthropic have released their own AI-powered coding tools, Cursor has continued to expand its user base, especially for business customers. The firm says its products are used by 64% of Fortune 500 companies, and that its tools write more than 100 million lines of code a day for enterprise customers. In April, SpaceX announced that it had reached an agreement giving it the option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion, but elected to defer the formal acquisition until after its IPO to minimize disruptions and avoid extra paperwork. The deal represented a premium to the $50 billion valuation Cursor had recently been floating in a funding round, Bloomberg reported in April. It also came with a $10 billion breakup fee should the purchase fall through. SpaceX’s management has framed the acquisition as central to expanding its AI capabilities following its merger in February with Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup, xAI. “Cursor has their own models, I think, and we can learn from them,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said Friday in an interview with CNBC. “We’re going to collaborate closely. We think this makes a huge amount of sense.” ©2026 Bloomberg L.P.