Cursor’s 25-year-old CEO is a former Google intern who just inked a $60 billion deal with SpaceX

Cursor’s 25-year-old CEO, Michael Truell, helped take the AI coding company from a college passion project to a potential $60 billion acquisition by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

On Tuesday, SpaceX announced in a post on X that Cursor gave SpaceX the right to acquire the company later this year for $60 billion. If SpaceX doesn’t buy Cursor, it will pay $10 billion for their work together, the company said.

Either way, it’s a big win for Truell, who, just a few years after dropping out of MIT, is worth an estimated $1.3 billion, according to Forbes. His and Cursor’s rapid rise are among Silicon Valley’s biggest success stories.

Who is Michael Truell?

Truell grew up in New York City and attended the Horace Mann School, a private prep school in the Bronx. He’d always had an interest in technology, and started coding at age 11 to make his own mobile games, he told Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle. 

By age 18, Truell had just wrapped up his first year at MIT and was completing a summer internship at Google. During this time, he worked o...