SpaceX just cut a $60B deal with an AI startup built by 4 MIT dropouts — its CEO is 25 and worth $1.3B

Elon Musk's SpaceX conscionable made a woody with a coding startup founded by 4 assemblage kids who dropped retired of MIT 3 years ago.

On April 21, SpaceX announced connected X (1) that it is moving unneurotic with Cursor, an AI coding instrumentality utilized by 64% (2) of Fortune 500 companies, to make what it called "the world's champion coding and cognition enactment AI."

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The woody has 2 parts: SpaceX pays Cursor $10 cardinal for their enactment together, oregon it acquires the institution for $60 cardinal aboriginal this year.

As SpaceX enactment it, "the operation of Cursor's starring merchandise and organisation to adept bundle engineers with SpaceX's cardinal H100 equivalent Colossus grooming supercomputer volition let america to physique the world's astir utile models." (3)

Cursor CEO Michael Truell responded connected X that helium was "excited to spouse with the SpaceX squad to standard up Composer" — the sanction of Cursor's AI model. (4)

Truell grew up successful New York City and attended Horace Mann, a backstage prep schoolhouse successful the Bronx. He enrolled successful MIT, finished his archetypal year, and landed a summertime internship astatine Google astatine 18, wherever helium worked connected connection models for provender ranking.

During that internship, helium met Ali Partovi — an aboriginal capitalist successful Facebook and Airbnb — who was recruiting for his Neo Scholars program, an accelerator for young tech talent. Truell completed a written coding trial Partovi gave him successful grounds time, and Partovi marked his sanction truthful emphatically that helium committed to put successful immoderate Truell built next. Truell became 1 of conscionable 30 Neo Scholars selected that year, and Partovi became 1 of Cursor's archetypal investors. (5)

Truell and 3 MIT classmates — Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark — near schoolhouse successful 2022 to commencement Anysphere, the institution down Cursor. Their archetypal 2 ideas to physique a coding adjunct for mechanical engineers and a connection encryption task failed. They past pivoted to AI coding — a abstraction they had initially avoided because, arsenic Truell told Y Combinator's AI Startup School, "we thought it was excessively competitive." (6)

Cursor launched successful March 2023 and became what galore successful the manufacture telephone 1 of the "fastest-growing SaaS companies" successful past (7), reaching $100 cardinal successful annualized gross successful 12 months — adjacent faster than Slack successful its aboriginal days. Cursor's valuation went from $2.5 cardinal successful January 2025 to $29.3 cardinal by November 2025 aft raising $2.3 cardinal successful Series D backing (8).