Day after SpaceX went public, Elon Musk‘s mega-company announced plans to acquire Anysphere, the parent company of the AI coding agent cursorABOUT 60 billion dollars in the third quarter of this year. Behind Cursor are four former MIT classmates in their mid-20s. All co-founders became billionaires in November after a $2.3 billion funding round that valued the company at $29.3 billion. With each owning approximately 4.5 percent of the stock, a SpaceX the acquisition would push their net worth to about $2.7 billion each.
Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark AND Aman Sanger founded San Francisco-based Anysphere in 2022 after meeting at MIT. In just a few years, their flagship product, Cursor, has become a widely used tool for building AI coding agents, now adopted by 64 percent of Fortune 500 companies, including Nvidia, Adobe and even competitor OpenAI. Global research firm Gartner has positioned it as one the leader in enterprise coding tools alongside OpenAI, Anthropogenic and GitHub.
The move comes nearly two months after Cursor, with whom he has worked closely xAI to integrate its technology into the Grok assistant, granted exclusive purchase rights to xAI’s parent company, SpaceX. If the $60 billion deal falls through, SpaceX has agreed to pay Cursor 10 billion dollars for their cooperation. The deal heralds rapid growth for a team that went from university classmates to major players in the AI race in just a few years.
Michael Truell, CEO
The 25-year-old co-founder and CEO attended New York’s Horace Mann School before enrolling at MIT in 2018. He interned at Two Sigma, Google and Octant previously abandonment in 2021 to co-found Cursor. In 2020, Truell was recognized as a Neo Scholar along with Aman Sanger, with Neo later becoming one of the earliest investors in Cursor’s $400,000 seed round.
“There would be an opportunity for all coding to change in the next five years and for all software development to go through patterns.” Truell said in an interview ABOUT The Y combinator‘s Startup School on AI in San Francisco last year. “It felt like no one working in the space at the time was really taking it seriously.”
Sualeh Asif, Chief Product Officer
Originally from Pakistan, Asif attended the country’s prestigious school, Nixor College, where he graduated valedictorian in 2018. At MIT, he worked as a research assistant at the Supertech Lab and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
“Overall, over a period of 1-2 years, I expect the way people will code will change,” Asif said in an interview with AI researchers and entrepreneurs Lukas Biewald in his YouTube series Gradient Dissent last year. “In the short term, it looks really scary, but it’s going to be this gradual process and it’s going to be extremely natural for everybody.”
Aman Sanger, Chief Operating Officer
Sanger attended Horace Mann School with Truell before enrolling at MIT in 2018. He interned at Google and the hedge fund giant Bridgewater Associates before graduation and was also named a 2020 Neo Scholar.
“A lot of work for Cursor has been just experimenting with what’s possible,” Sanger said in an interview with venture capitalist Rajan Ananda. “For everything you can see in the product, there are ten failed experiments of what didn’t work.” Sanger said he started coding at age 14.
Arvid Lunnemark, Co-Founder
Lunnemark, 26, graduated from Malmö Borgarskola High School in Sweden in 2018 before attending MIT, where he worked at QuantCo, Stripe and trading firms. Jane Street. In October 2025, he announced his starting from the cursor THE found a new ventureIntegrous Research, focused on building more secure AI systems. It is said to retain its founding equity shares, allowing it to benefit from the potential acquisition.
While still in stealth mode, Integrous Research says it is “committed to protecting individual human freedom before, during, and after the dawn of the age of superintelligence” and believes that “by the time superintelligence can do that research for us, it may already be too late.”
