The quiet, galactic ambitions of Cursor CEO Michael Truell

T n 2019, Michael Truell, a shy, 18-year-old MIT student, sat staring at a coding test in the cafe of the Computer History Museum. It was supposed to take him about an hour, but he finished it in less than 10 minutes. "He crushed it," recalls tech investor Ali Partovi, who runs a program to find the world's best coders while they're still undergrads. With the extra time, Partovi asked Truell to give him a coding question. Partovi, a programmer who cofounded Code.org, took far longer to complete it. By the end, his sheet of paper looked like a mess compared to the teenager's neat lines of code.

Truell, now 25, is the CEO of Cursor, the AI coding startup that inked a potential $60 billion sale to Elon Musk's SpaceX. The wispy, floppy-haired redhead comes across as quiet and kind to people who've worked with him, preferring long, monk-like stretches of coding to posting his latest revenue or weightlifting stats like some of his young founder peers. Within Cursor, it's well-known that he didn't pay himself for the first few years of the company's existence.

Beneath the humble demeanor, though, Truell has long harbored ambitions as grandiose as anyone in Silicon Valley, telling staff he wants Cursor to become a generational company. As a teen, he built a popular coding game centered on conquering the universe. As a founder fresh out of MIT, he and his college friends took on Microsoft at coding — and won. At Cursor, he presides over an intense work culture that sees candidates put through labyrinthine, unpaid "work trials" that can stretch on for weeks so he can find exactly the right fit.

Becoming one of tech's fastest-growing startups hasn't come easy. Cursor has had to navigate a testy relationship with Anthropic, its main AI provider until the frontier lab started launching its own ultra-viral coding tools. After declaring an emergency over the existential threat Claude posed to his company, Truell has tied Cursor's fate ever closer to Musk's freshly IPOed SpaceX, which is desperately trying to win the AI race — and has billions of dollars in computing power.

Cursor declined to comment for this article. Anthropic and SpaceX didn't respond to requests for comment.

Truell now faces his biggest test yet. Will partnering with Musk pan out? Regardless of the outcome, Cursor's CEO has made plans to ensure his startup earns its place in the annals of computer history.

Raised in New York City by journalist parents, Truell has been a gifted coder, and coding evangelist, from an early age. When he was 15, as a student at the elite Horace Mann prep school, he co-built a coding game called Halite that taught people the basics of programming by having them conquer territory on a grid. The project attracted thousands of users — mostly high school and college students who had never coded before — and won him a $10,000 cash prize from a top math association.

At MIT, he double-majored in computer science and math, and began plotting startup ideas. Claire Shorall, who helped run a startup bootcamp Truell attended as an undergrad, says Truell's curiosity and humility stuck out. When he was tasked with cold calling doctors across the country to validate an early startup idea, Truell asked Shorall to sit next to him and critique his technique as they huddled around a landline. The idea, a competitor to ZocDoc, never panned out, but Shorall could tell Truell had something beyond raw coding ability. "I gave him some pointers — he clearly already had it," she said.

In 2022, after graduating, Truell cofounded what was then a code editing platform, Anysphere, with his MIT classmates Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. Within 12 months they'd grown it to $1 million in recurring revenue by building a better version of Microsoft's open-source code editor, VS Code. "In the next several years, our mission is to make programming an order of magnitude faster, more fun and creative," Truell told TechCrunch at the time.

To fulfill that mission, Cursor launched in March 2023, and it grew quickly, catching on with developers and businesses eager to turbocharge their output. In 2024, Cursor disclosed over 40,000 customers and an ambitious goal of building a "magical" tool that would one day write literally all of the world's software. "Something beautiful is happening to code," the company announced in a blog post at the time. By the end of 2025, it had been adopted by millions of developers, and revenue had multiplied by ten in less than a year to over a billion dollars, Cursor announced.

The growth was intense, and that intensity is also evident in Cursor's hiring process, where Truell is deeply involved, according to four former employees. He regularly trawls GitHub and X to identify top engineers, then puts candidates through multi-day "work trials" at Cursor's sprawling, college-campus-like San Francisco headquarters.

Candidates do essentially everything they would as full-time employees: eat lunch with the team, sit at a desk with a company laptop, and work off a frozen version of Cursor's codebase to complete projects. "It really gives us a lot of signal on the raw technical skills needed to be successful in our environment," Truell said on a podcast last November. Others have criticized the work trials for being unpaid, with one person who described themselves as a former interviewee decrying them as "exploitative and unethical" on Reddit.

A former employee recalled receiving a late-night email asking them to show up at Cursor's office at 9 a.m. the next morning for a series of coding projects. In another instance, they said Cursor declined to hire a management-level candidate after a monthlong work trial in which the person met virtually every member of the team. "At the end of the month, they were like, 'We could probably do better than this candidate,'" the employee said, pointing to how high the bar was for new entrants —and how effective it was.

While Cursor has grown at a breakneck pace, its executives have long feared the company had become overly attached, and reliant, on a single AI provider. Employees often describe the company's relationship with Anthropic in one word: weird.

The companies are highly interdependent. Cursor relies heavily on Anthropic's AI models to power its coding tools. Anthropic, meanwhile, has benefited enormously from Cursor's explosive growth. At one point in its early days, Cursor accounted for roughly 40% to 50% of Anthropic's revenue, according to one employee familiar with the numbers. "On both sides, they kind of realized they needed each other. We're making Anthropic a ton of money," another employee described. "At the same time, Anthropic has a competitive product."

Ahead of releasing its blockbuster code editor Claude Code, Anthropic executives privately reassured Cursor leadership that the product was more of a research effort than a major commercial push, according to a person familiar with the discussions. But Claude Code quickly took off with developers. By February 2026, its run-rate revenue had grown to $2.5 billion, about half a billion dollars more than Cursor's was at the time, as first reported by Bloomberg. Developers began posting that they were canceling Cursor in favor of Claude Code.

Executives' concerns over Cursor's dependence on Anthropic were already high after Anthropic cut off a rival AI coding startup, Windsurf, during Windsurf's acquisition talks with OpenAI.

On January 5, Truell held what one employee described as an "emergency" all-hands, and announced that Cursor needed to build its own AI model. The message, according to two employees, was clear: We have to make sure we don't get left behind. We're going to cancel all unnecessary meetings, and you may be tapped to work with a different team this week. We have to be fluid and adapt quickly.

After the meeting, Cursor began a lengthy pricing analysis comparing Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, as well as meetings to reassure its largest customers. Executives also concluded that Cursor needed to double down on building its own model to reduce reliance on the frontier labs and gain more control over pricing.

While Cursor declined to comment for this article, Truell described his startup's relationship with Anthropic as a "deep partnership" and "one we're really grateful for" in a recent interview.

Cursor has since launched Composer, its own suite of coding-focused models, which are built off open source models from the Chinese AI lab Moonshot. Composer has started to gain traction with developers, and Cursor says that the Composer 2.5 model it released in May is over 85% its own work — meaning that the underlying Moonshot model amounts to only a small slice of the final product.

"With Composer we've gotten insanely positive feedback," said Lucas Garza, a Cursor engineer, thanks to its cheap price and speed — particularly as AI costs rise and hit engineering budgets across tech.

Cursor's latest tools are drumming up excitement. On a hot afternoon in June, Cafe Cursor was probably the busiest cafe in San Francisco's touristy North Beach neighborhood. The pop-up, run by Cursor, hands out free lattes and $50 credits to eager startup builders, who gushed about the company's impact on their productivity.

Aneesh Dharani, who founded an AI flashcards startup, credited Cursor for getting his product off the ground despite the fact that he doesn't have a software engineering background. Another founder, Devon Lim, said he'd used Cursor to replace an outsourced engineer who had "ghosted" his sales startup.

But building and running a top-tier AI model is brutally expensive, and Cursor lacked the chips to do it entirely on its own. So this spring, Truell and his company found another founder with galactic ambitions to fill that gap: Elon Musk.

on April 21, Truell, in his trademark laconic style, announced a new partnership on X.

"Excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale up Composer. A meaningful step on our path to build the best place to code with AI," he posted.

On the surface, the deal, which was first reported by Business Insider, is a win-win for both parties. Cursor gets access to SpaceX's massive computing resources, including Colossus, a supercomputer powered by hundreds of thousands of top-of-the-line Nvidia AI chips. SpaceX's Grok, which one xAI contractor told Business Insider is not the "best at coding," gets a leg up in the AI coding race.

Left unsaid by Truell's X post was a much bigger development: Truell had agreed to a potential $60 billion acquisition by SpaceX later this year.

The announcement caught many Cursor employees off guard, given that Truell had spoken about building Cursor for the long haul. "It's a big risk, or a big bet, that we're making," Truell would say when dismissing acquisition talk, according to one former employee.

The deal's structure is atypical. According to SpaceX's S-1 filing last month, if either party decides not to move forward, SpaceX will pay Cursor a $1.5 billion termination fee — and provide another $8.5 billion in free computing power.

Ali Partovi, the investor who wrote one of Cursor's first checks — and who has no inside knowledge of the deal — says that while many entrepreneurs claim they'll never sell, they exist on a spectrum. He puts Truell on the end that tends to hold out. "He has a level of ambition, self-confidence, and drive that pushes him toward staying independent," Partovi said.

For now, Cursor remains independent and is still growing fast. Its revenue doubled in three months to $4 billion, Forbes reported.

There are early signs of progress. Musk has posted on X that recent versions of SpaceX's chatbot, Grok, improved significantly after training on "a lot" of Cursor data. Both Grok and Composer are inching upward in closely-watched rankings of AI models known as benchmarks, though neither tops them yet.

For Musk, the goal is clear — his AI will be "great," no matter what. "Whether it is the best remains to be seen, but I will never give up," he posted on X. "Never."

For Cursor, the ultimate goal is a little less clear, given the open-ended structure of the SpaceX deal.

Cursor now counts 700 employees and serves 60% of the Fortune 500, Truell said in a recent interview. His startup now rivals many of the world's biggest public software companies, Truell added.

"It's definitely kind of crazy," he said, "and it's not lost on us how special this is — how unprecedented it is, historically."

Shubhangi Goel is a senior reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau. Charles Rollet is Business Insider's tech correspondent in San Francisco.

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