Original Title: Inside Cursor's wild rise
Original Authors: Shubhangi Goel and Charles Rollet, Businesses Insider
Original Translation: Peggy, BlockBeats
Editor's Note: This article tells the story of Cursor CEO Michael Truell and the rapid rise of this AI programming unicorn.
In 2019, 18-year-old Truell was an MIT student who completed a programming test in under 10 minutes that was originally expected to take an hour. A few years later, he founded Anysphere with several MIT classmates, launching Cursor, aiming to redefine how developers write code. By the end of 2025, Cursor was used by millions of developers, and its revenue grew tenfold in less than a year, surpassing $1 billion.
However, Cursor's story is not merely a typical Silicon Valley narrative of a "genius programmer's entrepreneurial success." The article's more noteworthy aspects reveal the structural dilemmas faced by AI application companies: when a company is built on cutting-edge models, it can grow rapidly due to the model's capabilities, but can also be quickly squeezed when the model provider enters the arena. Cursor's relationship with Anthropic is a prime example. Cursor had heavily relied on Anthropic's models, but after Anthropic launched Claude Code, the two transitioned from partners to potential competitors, leading Cursor to push for its own model, Composer.
Meanwhile, Cursor's rapid growth has come with controversy. The article mentions that Cursor's hiring process is extremely rigorous, with candidates required to participate in unpaid "work trials" lasting several days or even weeks; internally, there has been long-term concern about over-relying on a single AI model supplier. These details make Cursor's success appear more complex: it is one of the most representative application layer companies in the AI programming wave, while also being a startup seeking balance amid rapid expansion, extreme culture, and model dependency.
What truly moves the story into a new phase is Truell's alliance with Elon Musk's SpaceX. To support its self-developed model, Cursor needs expensive and scarce computing power; meanwhile, SpaceX/xAI needs to enhance Grok's programming capabilities. The collaboration appears to complement computing power, data, and model capabilities, but behind the scenes lies a potential $60 billion acquisition arrangement. If the deal proceeds, Cursor could become a key programming infrastructure within Musk's AI ecosystem; if it remains independent, it must still prove that AI application companies can grow into true generational companies in the niches left by frontier model giants.
The central question of this article is: Will Cursor become the gateway to the next generation of software companies, or a puzzle piece in the computing power war among AI giants?
Below is the original translation:
Michael Truell: From Genius 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. Typically, the problem would take about an hour to complete, but he finished in under 10 minutes.
"He completely crushed that problem," recalled tech investor Ali Partovi. Partovi runs a program that seeks out the world's top programmers at the undergraduate level. With plenty of time remaining, Partovi asked Truell to pose a programming question for him. Partovi, also a programmer and a co-founder of Code.org, took longer to complete his task. By the time he finished, his paper was a mess; in contrast, the young man's code was neat and clear.
Now, 25-year-old Truell is the CEO of Cursor. This AI programming startup has secured a potential $60 billion acquisition deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX. This slender, frizzy-haired young man is seen by colleagues as quiet and friendly. Unlike some young founders who are keen to flaunt the latest revenue figures or fitness stats, he prefers to immerse himself in coding for extended periods, almost like a monk. Internally at Cursor, everyone knows that in the early years of the company's founding, he did not pay himself a salary.
However, beneath the humble exterior lies a grand ambition that rivals anyone in Silicon Valley. He has told employees that he hopes Cursor will become a "generational company." As a teenager, he developed a popular programming game themed around conquering the universe; right after graduating from MIT, he challenged Microsoft in the code editor space with several college classmates and ultimately succeeded. At Cursor, he leads an extremely intense work culture: to find the right fit, the company subjects candidates to intricate and unpaid "work trials," which can sometimes last for weeks.
Becoming one of the fastest-growing startups in the tech industry is no easy feat. Cursor has consistently needed to navigate a delicate and tense relationship with Anthropic. Anthropic was Cursor's primary AI model supplier until this leading AI lab began launching its own popular programming tools. After Claude posed a survival threat to the company, Truell declared a state of emergency for the company. Subsequently, he tied Cursor's fate more deeply to Musk's newly public SpaceX, which is eager to win the AI race and holds computing resources worth billions.
Cursor declined to comment for this article. Anthropic and SpaceX also did not respond to requests for comments.
Truell now faces his biggest test yet: can the partnership with Musk succeed? Regardless of the outcome, this Cursor CEO has already begun strategizing to ensure his company secures a place in computer history.
Truell grew up in New York, with parents who are both journalists. He has been a gifted programmer from a young age and began promoting programming early. At age 15, while a student at the elite private Horace Mann school, he participated in developing a programming game called Halite. This game teaches programming fundamentals by having players conquer territories on a grid. The project attracted thousands of users, most of whom were high school and college students who had never written code before, and won him a $10,000 award from a top mathematics association.
After entering MIT, he double-majored in computer science and mathematics, starting to conceive entrepreneurial projects. Claire Shorall assisted in operating a startup bootcamp that Truell attended during his undergraduate years. She was impressed by Truell's curiosity and humility. He needed to make cold calls to doctors across the U.S. to validate an early startup idea. Truell asked Shorall to sit beside him while they made calls on a landline phone, helping him critique his communication skills. The project aimed to create a competitor to ZocDoc, but ultimately failed. Still, Shorall noticed that Truell possessed more than just raw programming talent.
"I gave him some advice—but it was clear he already had that ability," she said.
After graduating in 2022, Truell co-founded Anysphere with MIT classmates Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. At that time, it was a code editing platform. In less than 12 months, they reached $1 million in recurring revenue by creating a better alternative to Microsoft's open-source code editor, VS Code.
"Our mission over the next few years is to increase the speed of programming by an order of magnitude while making it more fun and creative," Truell told TechCrunch at the time.
Controversies Behind Rapid 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 businesses eager to significantly boost productivity. In 2024, Cursor revealed that its customer count surpassed 40,000, presenting an ambitious goal: to create a "magical" tool that could one day truly write all the software in the world.
"Code is undergoing some beautiful transformation," 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 that its revenue had grown tenfold in less than a year, exceeding $1 billion.
Cursor's growth is extremely fierce, and this intensity is reflected in the company's hiring process. Four former employees stated that Truell is deeply involved in hiring. He often searches for top engineers on GitHub and X, then invites candidates to Cursor's spacious headquarters in San Francisco for multi-day "work trials."
During the trial period, candidates do almost everything formal employees do: lunch with the team, sitting at a desk using company computers, and completing projects based on a frozen version of the Cursor codebase.
"This really allows us to gain a lot of signals about whether a candidate has the raw technical abilities needed to succeed in our environment," Truell said in a podcast last November.
However, some criticize that these work trials are unpaid. A person claiming to have participated in a Cursor interview condemned the process on Reddit as "exploitative and unethical."
One former employee recalled receiving an email late at night requesting them to arrive at Cursor's office at 9 AM the next morning to complete a set of programming tasks. In another instance, this former employee stated that Cursor had a managerial candidate undergo a month-long work trial. During this period, the individual met nearly every team member, but the company ultimately decided not to hire them.
"After the month was over, their attitude was, 'We might be able to find someone better than this candidate,'" this former employee said. He believes this reflects both Cursor's high expectations of newcomers and the effectiveness of this screening mechanism.
Despite Cursor's impressive growth, its executives have long been concerned that the company has become overly dependent on a single AI supplier. Employees often use one word to describe the relationship between Cursor and Anthropic: strange.
The two companies are highly interdependent. Cursor heavily relies on Anthropic's AI models to power its programming tools. At the same time, Anthropic has also benefited significantly from Cursor's explosive growth. According to an employee familiar with the figures, at an early stage, Cursor contributed about 40% to 50% of Anthropic's revenue.
"Both sides are somewhat aware that they need each other. We brought a lot of revenue to Anthropic," said another employee, "but at the same time, Anthropic has its own competing products."
Before launching its flagship code editor Claude Code, Anthropic executives privately assured Cursor's management that this product would be more of a research project than a major commercial push. An insider stated that discussions took place between the two parties. However, Claude Code quickly gained popularity among developers. By February 2026, its annualized revenue had risen to $2.5 billion, approximately $500 million higher than Cursor's annualized revenue at that time. This figure was first reported by Bloomberg. Developers also began posting that they were canceling Cursor and switching to Claude Code.
Prior to this, Cursor executives had already held significant concerns about the company's reliance on Anthropic. One reason is that Anthropic had cut services to competitor AI programming startup Windsurf during acquisition discussions with OpenAI.
On January 5, Truell held an all-hands meeting that one employee referred to as an "emergency meeting," announcing that Cursor needed to build its own AI model. Two employees stated that the message conveyed at that time was very clear: we must ensure we are not left behind. The company would cancel all unnecessary meetings, and this week you might be temporarily reassigned to work with different teams. We must remain flexible and quickly adapt to changes.
After the meeting, Cursor began a long pricing analysis, comparing Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, while also holding meetings to reassure the company's largest clients. Executives concluded that Cursor must double down on its investment in self-developed models to reduce dependence on frontier model labs and gain more control over pricing.
Although Cursor declined to comment on this article, Truell described the company's relationship with Anthropic as a "deep partnership" in a recent interview and stated, "We are very grateful for this."
Cursor's Biggest Gamble: Breaking Away from Anthropic, Aligning with Musk
Subsequently, Cursor launched Composer, its proprietary programming model. Composer is built on the open-source model from the Chinese AI lab Moonshot. It has already begun to gain traction among developers. Cursor claims that over 85% of the components in this year’s May release of Composer 2.5 come from Cursor's own work—meaning that the underlying Moonshot model only accounts for a small portion of the final product.
"Composer has received extremely positive feedback," Cursor engineer Lucas Garza stated. This is primarily due to its low price and high speed, especially given the backdrop of rising AI costs and pressure on tech companies' engineering budgets.
Cursor's latest tools are also stirring new excitement. On a hot June afternoon, Cafe Cursor, a pop-up café run by Cursor in San Francisco's North Beach tourist district, may be the busiest café in the whole block. This pop-up café offers enthusiastic entrepreneurs free lattes and a $50 credit. Many are praising Cursor for boosting their productivity.
This month, tech practitioners are lounging in Cursor's pop-up café, Cafe Cursor. Charles Rollet/Business Insider
Aneesh Dharani founded an AI flashcard startup. He said that despite lacking a software engineering background, Cursor helped him bring his product to life. Another founder, Devon Lim, stated that he had used Cursor to replace an outsourced engineer who had suddenly "gone dark" and stopped working for his sales startup.
However, building and operating a top-tier AI model is extremely costly, and Cursor itself does not have enough chips to complete this task independently. Therefore, this spring, Truell and his company found another founder with "interstellar-level ambitions" to fill this gap: Elon Musk.
On April 21, Truell announced a new partnership on X in his usual concise style.
"Excited to collaborate with the SpaceX team to extend Composer. This is an important step on our journey to build the best place for AI programming," he wrote.
On the surface, this deal is beneficial for both parties. Cursor gains access to SpaceX's vast computing resources, including Colossus—a supercomputer powered by hundreds of thousands of top-tier Nvidia AI chips. Meanwhile, SpaceX's Grok could also gain an advantage in the AI programming competition. An xAI contractor told Business Insider that Grok is not "the best at programming" model.
What Truell did not mention in that X post is that a bigger development has emerged: he has agreed that later this year, SpaceX could acquire Cursor for $60 billion.
This news surprised many Cursor employees, as Truell had previously spoken of building Cursor for the long term. A former employee said that whenever acquisition discussions arose, Truell would state, "This is a huge risk we are taking, or rather a huge gamble."
The structure of this deal is also quite unusual. According to an 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 in free computing power.
Ali Partovi is one of Cursor's earliest investors but is not privy to the internal details of this deal. He said that while many entrepreneurs claim they would never sell their company, in reality, they fall on a spectrum. Partovi believes Truell leans more towards the side of those who prefer to remain independent.
"His ambition, confidence, and drive will push him to want to stay independent," Partovi said.
Currently, Cursor remains independent and continues to grow rapidly. According to Forbes, its revenue doubled in three months, reaching $4 billion.
Some early progress has been made. Musk has posted on X that recent versions of Grok have significantly improved after training on "a large amount" of Cursor data. Grok and Composer are both gradually rising in the highly followed AI model rankings—benchmarks—although neither has reached the top yet.
For Musk, the goal is clear: his AI will inevitably become "very strong."
"Whether it becomes the strongest remains to be seen, but I will never give up," he wrote on X, "Never."
For Cursor, however, the ultimate goal is not so clear, as the deal structure with SpaceX itself remains quite open.
In a recent interview, Truell stated that Cursor currently has 700 employees serving 60% of the Fortune 500 companies. He also said that the company can now be compared to many of the largest publicly traded software companies in the world.
"It's kind of crazy," he said, "and we are very aware of how special this is—historically, how unprecedented it is."
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