Editor's Note: This article tells the story of Cursor CEO Michael Truell and the rapid rise of this AI programming unicorn.
In 2019, an 18-year-old Truell was an MIT student who completed a programming test in under 10 minutes, a problem expected to take an hour. Years later, he co-founded Anysphere with several MIT classmates and launched Cursor, aiming to redefine how developers write code. By the end of 2025, Cursor was used by millions of developers, with revenue growing tenfold in less than a year, surpassing $1 billion.
However, Cursor's story is not just a typical Silicon Valley narrative of a "genius programmer's success." The more noteworthy part of the article lies in revealing the structural dilemma faced by AI application companies: a company built on top of cutting-edge models can experience hypergrowth fueled by the models' capabilities, yet it can also be quickly squeezed out when the model provider enters the market directly. The relationship between Cursor and Anthropic exemplifies this. Cursor once heavily relied on Anthropic's models, but after Anthropic launched Claude Code, the two transitioned from partners to potential competitors, prompting Cursor to push forward with its self-developed model, Composer.
Meanwhile, Cursor's rapid growth has been accompanied by controversy. The article mentions that Cursor's hiring process is extremely rigorous, with candidates required to participate in multi-day or even multi-week unpaid "work trials." Internally, the company has long harbored concerns about over-reliance on a single AI model supplier. These details add complexity to Cursor's success: it is both one of the most representative application-layer companies in the AI programming wave and a startup trying to find balance amidst hyper-scaling, extreme culture, and model dependency.
What truly propelled the story into a new phase was Truell's alignment with SpaceX, under Elon Musk. To support its self-developed model, Cursor needed expensive and scarce computing power, while SpaceX/xAI needed to enhance Grok's programming capabilities. On the surface, their cooperation was a complement of compute power, data, and model capabilities, but behind it lay a potential $60 billion acquisition arrangement. If the deal ultimately proceeds, Cursor could become a key piece of programming infrastructure within Musk's AI ecosystem. If it remains independent, it must prove that an AI application company can grow into a true generational company in the cracks between frontier model giants.
The core question of this article is: Will Cursor become the gateway to the next generation of software companies, or will it become a piece in the AI giants' computing power war?
The following is a translation of the original text:
Michael Truell: From Prodigy Programmer to Cursor CEO
In 2019, 18-year-old MIT student Michael Truell sat in a cafe at the Computer History Museum, staring at a programming test question. Theoretically, this problem would take about an hour to complete, but he finished it in under 10 minutes.
"He completely crushed that problem," recalled tech investor Ali Partovi. Partovi ran a program that sought out the world's best programmers at the undergraduate level. With so much time left, Partovi asked Truell to give him a programming problem instead. Partovi, himself a programmer and co-founder of Code.org, took much longer to complete it. By the time he finished, his paper was a mess; in contrast, the teenager's code lines were neat and clear.
Today, the 25-year-old Truell is the CEO of Cursor. This AI programming startup has reached a potential $60 billion acquisition agreement with SpaceX, led by Elon Musk. This slim, curly-haired redhead is seen by colleagues as quiet and friendly. Unlike some young founders who love to flaunt their latest revenue figures or fitness achievements, he prefers long, almost monastic immersion in coding. Inside Cursor, it's well known that during the company's initial years, he didn't take a salary.
However, beneath the humble exterior, Truell has long harbored ambitions no less grand than anyone else's in Silicon Valley. He has told employees he hopes Cursor becomes a "generational company." In his youth, he developed a popular programming game themed around conquering the universe; fresh out of MIT, he and several college classmates challenged Microsoft in the code editor space, and ultimately won. At Cursor, he fosters an extremely intense work culture: to find the perfectly suited candidates, the company puts them through complex, unpaid "work trials," sometimes lasting weeks.
Becoming one of the fastest-growing startups in tech isn't easy. Cursor has consistently had to navigate a delicate and tense relationship with Anthropic. Anthropic was once Cursor's primary AI model supplier, until the frontier AI lab began launching its own highly popular programming tools. After Claude became an existential threat, Truell declared a state of emergency at the company. Since then, he has increasingly tied Cursor's fate to the newly public SpaceX under Musk. SpaceX is desperate to win the AI race and controls tens of billions of dollars worth of computing resources.
Cursor declined to comment for this article. Anthropic and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Truell now faces his biggest test yet: Can the partnership with Musk actually succeed? Regardless of the outcome, the Cursor CEO has already begun strategizing to ensure his company secures a place in computing history.
Truell grew up in New York with parents who were both journalists. He was a prodigiously talented programmer from a young age and an early promoter of coding. At 15, while a student at the elite private school Horace Mann, he helped develop a programming game called Halite. The game taught programming basics by having players conquer territory on a grid. The project attracted thousands of users, mostly high school and college students who had never written code before, and earned him a $10,000 prize from a top mathematics association.
At MIT, he double-majored in computer science and mathematics and began conceptualizing startup ideas. Claire Shorall, who helped run a startup bootcamp Truell participated in as an undergraduate, said his curiosity and humility impressed her. At the time, he needed to make cold calls to doctors across the US to validate an early-stage startup idea. Truell asked Shorall to sit beside him and critique his communication skills as they huddled around a landline phone. That project, originally intended to be a competitor to ZocDoc, ultimately didn't succeed, but Shorall could already see Truell possessed more than raw programming ability.
"I gave him a few tips—but it was clear he already had that capacity," she said.
After graduating in 2022, Truell co-founded Anysphere with MIT classmates Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. At the time, it was still a code editing platform. In less than 12 months, they reached $1 million in recurring revenue by building a better alternative to Microsoft's open-source code editor, VS Code.
"Our mission for the next few years is to make programming an order of magnitude faster, while also making it more fun and creative," Truell told TechCrunch at the time.
Controversy Behind Hyper-Growth: Unpaid Trials, Extreme Hiring, and Model Dependency
To achieve this mission, Cursor officially launched in March 2023 and grew rapidly. It quickly gained popularity among developers and enterprises eager to drastically boost productivity. In 2024, Cursor disclosed it had over 40,000 customers and proposed an ambitious goal: to build a "magical" tool that could one day genuinely write all the world's software.
"Something beautiful is happening with code," the company wrote in a blog post at the time.
By the end of 2025, Cursor was adopted by millions of developers. The company announced its revenue had grown tenfold in less than a year, exceeding $10 billion.
Cursor's growth was extremely fierce, and this intensity was mirrored in its hiring process. Four former employees said Truell was deeply involved in recruitment. He often scoured GitHub and X for top engineers, then invited candidates to Cursor's campus-like headquarters in San Francisco for multi-day "work trials."
During these trials, candidates would do almost everything a full-time employee would: have lunch with the team, sit at a desk with a company computer, and work on projects based on a frozen version of Cursor's codebase.
"It does give us a ton of signal on whether the candidate has the raw technical ability to succeed in our environment," Truell said in a podcast last November.
However, some have criticized these work trials for being unpaid. One person who claimed to have interviewed at Cursor denounced the process on Reddit as "exploitative and unethical."
One former employee recalled receiving an email late at night asking them to be at the Cursor office at 9 a.m. the next day to complete a series of programming projects. In another instance, this former employee said Cursor had a management candidate undergo a work trial lasting a month. During this period, the candidate met nearly every member of the team, but the company ultimately decided not to hire them.
"After a month, their attitude was: 'We might still be able to find someone better than this candidate,'" the former employee said. They believed this illustrated both Cursor's extremely high bar for new hires and the effectiveness of this screening mechanism.
Despite Cursor's astonishing growth rate, its executives had long been concerned that the company had become overly attached and dependent on a single AI supplier. Employees often used one word to describe Cursor's relationship with Anthropic: weird.
The two companies were highly interdependent. Cursor relied heavily on Anthropic's AI models to power its programming tools. Meanwhile, Anthropic greatly benefited from Cursor's explosive growth. According to an employee familiar with the numbers, at an early stage, Cursor contributed roughly 40% to 50% of Anthropic's revenue.
"Both sides realized to some extent that they needed each other. We brought Anthropic a ton of revenue," another employee said. "But at the same time, Anthropic had its own competing product."
Before launching its heavyweight code editor, Claude Code, Anthropic executives privately assured Cursor's management that the product was more of a research project than a major commercial push, according to a person familiar with the matter. There had been communication between the two sides. But Claude Code quickly gained popularity among developers. By February 2026, its annualized revenue had grown to $2.5 billion, about $500 million higher than Cursor's annualized revenue at the time, as first reported by Bloomberg. Developers also began posting that they were canceling Cursor to use Claude Code instead.
Even before this, Cursor executives' concerns about the company's dependence on Anthropic were high. One reason was that Anthropic had previously cut off service to rival AI programming startup Windsurf during its acquisition talks with OpenAI.
On January 5th, Truell held an all-hands meeting described by one employee as an "emergency meeting," announcing that Cursor needed to build its own AI model. Two employees said the message was very clear: We must ensure we don't get left behind. The company will cancel all unnecessary meetings; you might be temporarily reassigned to work with different teams this week. We must stay flexible and adapt quickly.
Following the meeting, Cursor began a lengthy pricing analysis comparing Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, while also holding meetings to reassure its largest customers. Executives also concluded that Cursor must double down on its self-developed model to reduce reliance on frontier model labs and gain more pricing control.
Although Cursor declined to comment for this article, Truell recently described the relationship with Anthropic in an interview as a "deep partnership," adding, "We are incredibly grateful for it."
Cursor's Biggest Gamble: Breaking Free from Anthropic, Tying to Musk
Subsequently, Cursor launched Composer, its own suite of programming-oriented models. Composer is built on top of open-source models from the Chinese AI lab Moonshot. It has already started gaining traction among developers. Cursor claims that in the Composer 2.5 model released this May, over 85% of it came from Cursor's own work—meaning the underlying Moonshot model constituted only a small part of the final product.
"Composer has gotten extremely positive feedback," said Cursor engineer Lucas Garza. This is mainly due to its low price and high speed, especially in a context where AI costs are rising and tech companies' engineering budgets are under pressure.
Cursor's latest tools are also sparking renewed excitement. On a hot afternoon in June, Cafe Cursor, a pop-up coffee shop run by Cursor in San Francisco's North Beach tourist district, was likely the busiest cafe on the block. The cafe gave enthusiastic entrepreneurs free lattes and a $50 credit. Many praised Cursor's impact on their productivity.
Aneesh Dharani, who founded an AI flashcard startup, said that despite having no software engineering background, Cursor helped him actually build his product. Another founder, Devon Lim, said he used Cursor to replace a freelancer who had suddenly "ghosted" him, no longer working for his sales-focused startup.
However, building and running a top-tier AI model is extremely costly, and Cursor itself does not have enough chips to do it entirely independently. Therefore, this spring, Truell and his company found another founder with "interstellar-level ambition" to fill this gap: Elon Musk.
On April 21st, Truell announced a new collaboration in his characteristically concise style on X.
"Excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale Composer. An important step on our journey to make AI programming the best place to be," he wrote.
On the surface, the deal benefits both sides. Cursor gains access to SpaceX's vast compute resources, including Colossus—a supercomputer powered by hundreds of thousands of top-tier Nvidia AI chips. Meanwhile, SpaceX's Grok gets a boost in the AI programming race. An xAI contractor previously told Business Insider that Grok wasn't "the best at programming."
What Truell didn't mention in that X post was that a much larger development had emerged: he had agreed that SpaceX could potentially acquire Cursor for $60 billion later this year.
This news surprised many Cursor employees, as Truell had previously always spoken about building Cursor for the long term. One former employee said that whenever acquisitions were discussed, Truell would say, "This is a huge risk we're taking, or a huge bet we're making."
The structure of the deal is also highly unusual. According to the S-1 filing submitted by SpaceX last month, if either party decides not to proceed with the deal, SpaceX will pay Cursor a $1.5 billion termination fee and provide an additional $8.5 billion worth of free compute.
Ali Partovi, one of Cursor's earliest investors, said he is not privy to the deal's internal details. He said that while many founders claim they'll never sell their company, in reality, they exist on a spectrum. Partovi believes Truell is closer to the end that leans towards staying independent.
"His ambition, confidence, and drive push him more towards staying independent," Partovi said.
Currently, Cursor remains independent and continues its rapid growth. According to Forbes, its revenue doubled in three months to $4 billion.
Some early progress has already appeared. Musk posted on X that recent versions of Grok showed significant improvement after being trained on "a lot" of Cursor data. Both Grok and Composer are gradually climbing the ranks in the closely watched AI model leaderboards—or benchmarks—though neither has reached the top yet.
For Musk, the goal is clear: his AI will become "strong" regardless.
"Whether it will become the strongest remains to be seen, but I will never give up," he wrote on X. "Never."
For Cursor, the ultimate goal is less clear, as the structure of the deal with SpaceX itself remains quite open-ended.
Truell said in a recent interview that Cursor now has 700 employees serving 60% of Fortune 500 companies. He also stated the company can now be compared to many of the world's largest publicly traded software companies.
"It is kind of crazy," he said. "And we are very aware of how special this is—how unprecedented it is historically."
