Tự gắn mình vào cỗ xe chiến của SpaceX, chặng đường vươn lên 60 tỷ đô la của Cursor

Original title: Inside Cursor's wild rise

Original author: Shubhangi Goel and Charles Rollet, Business Insider

Original translation: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor's note: This article recounts the rapid rise of Cursor CEO Michael Truell and the AI coding unicorn.

In 2019, 18-year-old Truell, then an MIT student, completed a programming test in less than 10 minutes that was expected to take an hour. A few 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 10 times in under a year, surpassing $1 billion.

But Cursor's story is more than just a Silicon Valley narrative of a "genius programmer's successful startup." The article's more compelling part lies in its revelation of the structural dilemma faced by AI application companies: when a company is built on frontier models, it can grow rapidly by leveraging those models, but can also be quickly squeezed when the model supplier enters the market itself. This is precisely the dynamic between Cursor and Anthropic. Cursor was heavily reliant on Anthropic's models. After Anthropic launched Claude Code, the two transitioned from partners to potential competitors, prompting Cursor to develop its own in-house model, Composer.

Meanwhile, Cursor's high growth has been accompanied by controversy. The article mentions that Cursor's hiring process is extremely rigorous, with candidates asked to participate in multi-day, even multi-week, unpaid "work trials." The company has also long worried about over-reliance on a single AI model supplier. These details make Cursor's success seem more complex: it is both one of the most representative application-layer companies in the AI coding wave and a startup seeking balance between rapid expansion, an intense culture, and model dependency.

What truly propelled the story into a new phase was Truell's alignment with Elon Musk's SpaceX. To support its in-house model, Cursor needed expensive and scarce computing power; SpaceX/xAI, in turn, needed to enhance Grok's coding capabilities. On the surface, the partnership is a complement of computing power, data, and model capability, but behind it lies a potential $60 billion acquisition arrangement. If the deal proceeds, Cursor could become key coding 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 amidst the giants of frontier models.

The core question of this article is: Will Cursor become the entry point for the next generation of software companies, or merely a piece in the computing power war among AI giants?

Below is the original translation:

Michael Truell: From Prodigy Programmer to Cursor CEO

In 2019, 18-year-old MIT student Michael Truell sat in the cafe of the Computer History Museum, staring at a programming test. The problem was expected to take about an hour, but he finished it in less than 10 minutes.

"He absolutely crushed it," recalled Ali Partovi, a tech investor. Partovi runs a program that scours the world for the best undergraduate programmers. With time to spare, Partovi asked Truell to pose a problem for him. Partovi, a programmer who co-founded Code.org, took much longer to finish. When he did, his paper was a mess; the teenager's lines of code were clean and clear.

Now, at 25, Truell is the CEO of Cursor. The AI coding startup has struck a potential $60 billion acquisition deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX. Described as quiet and friendly by colleagues, the thin, frizzy-haired redhead prefers long, almost meditative sessions immersed in writing code, unlike some young founders who flaunt their latest revenue figures or fitness achievements. Within Cursor, it's well-known that he didn't draw a salary in the company's early years.

But beneath his humble exterior, Truell has long harbored ambitions as grand as anyone in Silicon Valley. He has told employees he wants Cursor to become a "generational company." As a teenager, he developed a popular programming game themed around conquering the universe. Fresh out of MIT, he and a few college friends challenged Microsoft in the code editor space and eventually won. At Cursor, he fosters a high-intensity work culture: to find the perfect fit, the company puts candidates through complex, unpaid "work trials" that can sometimes last for weeks.

Becoming one of the fastest-growing startups in tech has not been easy. Cursor has had to navigate a delicate and tense relationship with Anthropic, which was once its primary AI model supplier, until the frontier AI lab started launching its own wildly popular coding tools. After Claude posed an existential threat, Truell declared a state of emergency at the company. Subsequently, he tied Cursor's fate increasingly tighter to Musk's recently public SpaceX, which is desperate to win the AI race and controls tens of billions of dollars worth of computing power.

Cursor declined to comment for this article. Anthropic and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.

Truell now faces his biggest test yet: will the partnership with Musk succeed? Regardless of the outcome, the Cursor CEO is already planning to ensure his company's place in computer history.

Truell grew up in New York, the son of journalists. A naturally gifted programmer from a young age, he also began promoting programming early. At 15, while a student at the elite private school Horace Mann, he helped develop a programming game called Halite, which taught coding 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 won him a $10,000 prize from a top mathematics association.

At MIT, he double-majored in computer science and mathematics and began conceiving startup ideas. Claire Shorall, who helped run a startup boot camp Truell attended during his undergraduate years, says she was impressed by his curiosity and humility. At the time, he needed to cold-call doctors across the US to validate an early startup idea. Truell asked Shorall to sit with him as he made calls around a landline phone, asking for feedback on his communication skills. That project, intended as a ZocDoc competitor, ultimately failed, but Shorall could see Truell possessed more than raw programming ability.

"I gave him some advice, but it was clear he already had that capability," she said.

After graduating in 2022, Truell co-founded Anysphere with MIT classmates Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. Initially a code editing platform, within 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 make programming an order of magnitude faster, while making it more fun and creative," Truell told TechCrunch at the time.

Controversy Behind High Growth: Unpaid Trials, Extreme Hiring, and Model Dependency

To fulfill this mission, Cursor officially launched in March 2023 and grew rapidly. It quickly gained traction with developers and enterprises eager to boost productivity. In 2024, Cursor disclosed it had over 40,000 customers and set an ambitious goal: to build a "magical" tool that could one day write all the world's software.

"Something beautiful is happening to 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 10-fold in under a year, exceeding $1 billion.

Cursor's growth was explosive, and this intensity was reflected in its hiring process. According to four former employees, Truell was deeply involved in recruiting. He would often seek out top engineers on GitHub and X, then invite candidates to Cursor's sprawling, campus-like headquarters in San Francisco for multi-day "work trials."

During the trial, candidates did almost everything a regular employee would: eat lunch with the team, sit at a desk using a company computer, and complete projects based on a frozen version of the Cursor codebase.

"It really does give us a huge amount of signal about whether a candidate has the raw technical ability to succeed in our environment," Truell said on a podcast in November last year.

Critics, however, decried these work trials as unpaid. One person who claimed to have interviewed with Cursor posted on Reddit, condemning the process as "exploitative and unethical."

A former employee recalled receiving an email late at night asking them to report to the Cursor office by 9 a.m. the next day for a series of programming projects. In another instance, the former employee said Cursor put a management candidate through a work trial lasting a full month. During that time, the person met nearly every member of the team, but the company ultimately decided not to hire them.

"When the month ended, their attitude was, 'We could probably find someone better than this candidate,'" the former employee said, noting this reflected both Cursor's extremely high standards and the effectiveness of the screening mechanism.

Despite its phenomenal growth, Cursor's executives long worried that the company had become overly attached and dependent on a single AI supplier. Employees often used one word to describe the relationship between Cursor and Anthropic: strange.

The two companies were highly interdependent. Cursor relied heavily on Anthropic's AI models to power its coding tool. Simultaneously, Anthropic greatly benefited from Cursor's explosive growth. According to an employee familiar with the numbers, Cursor accounted for an estimated 40% to 50% of Anthropic's revenue at an early stage.

"Both sides recognized to some extent that they needed each other. We brought in a lot of revenue for Anthropic," said another employee. "But at the same time, Anthropic had its own competing product."

Before launching its blockbuster code editor, Claude Code, Anthropic executives privately assured Cursor management that the product was more of a research project than a major commercial push, according to a person familiar with the matter. However, Claude Code quickly went viral among developers. By February 2026, its annualized revenue had grown to $2.5 billion, roughly $500 million more than Cursor's annualized revenue at the time, a figure first reported by Bloomberg. Developers began posting online that they were canceling their Cursor subscriptions in favor of Claude Code.

Even before this, Cursor executives had high concerns about the company's dependence on Anthropic. One reason was that Anthropic had previously cut off service to Windsurf, a competing AI coding startup, during its acquisition talks with OpenAI.

On January 5, Truell held an all-hands meeting that one employee described as an "emergency meeting" and announced that Cursor needed to build its own AI model. Two employees said the message was clear: "We must ensure we aren't left behind." The company canceled all non-essential meetings for the week, and employees were told they might be temporarily reassigned to work with different teams. "We need to be flexible and adapt quickly," the message went.

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 concluded that Cursor must double down on developing its own models to reduce reliance on frontier model labs and gain more control over pricing.

Although Cursor declined to comment for this article, Truell described the company's relationship with Anthropic as a "deep partnership" in a recent interview, adding, "We are very grateful for it."

Cursor's Biggest Bet: Breaking Away from Anthropic, Tying Up with Musk

Subsequently, Cursor launched Composer, its own suite of models for coding. Built on an open-source model from Chinese AI lab Moonshot, it is already gaining traction with developers. Cursor claims that in the Composer 2.5 model released in May, over 85% of the work came from Cursor itself—meaning the underlying Moonshot model constitutes only a small fraction of the final product.

"Composer has received incredibly positive feedback," said Cursor engineer Lucas Garza, attributing this mainly to its low price and high speed, especially against the backdrop of rising AI costs and pressure on engineering budgets in tech companies.

Cursor's latest tools are also generating fresh buzz. On a hot afternoon in June, Cafe Cursor, a pop-up coffee shop operated by Cursor in San Francisco's North Beach tourist district, might have been the busiest cafe on the block. It offered free lattes and $50 credits to enthusiastic entrepreneurs, many of whom praised how Cursor had boosted their productivity.

Tech professionals relaxing at Cursor's pop-up coffee shop, Cafe Cursor, this month. Charles Rollet/Business Insider

Aneesh Dharani, who founded an AI flashcard startup, said that despite having no software engineering background, Cursor helped him build his product. Another founder, Devon Lim, said he used Cursor to replace an outsourced engineer who had suddenly gone "dark" and stopped working for his sales startup.

However, building and running a top-tier AI model is extremely costly, and Cursor lacks enough chips to do it entirely independently. So, this spring, Truell and his company found another founder with "interstellar ambitions" to fill the gap: Elon Musk.

On April 21, Truell announced a new partnership on X in his characteristically concise style.

"Excited to work with the SpaceX team to scale Composer. A significant step on our path to building the best place for AI programming," he wrote.

On the surface, the deal benefits both sides. Cursor gains access to SpaceX's vast computing power 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 coding race. A contractor for xAI told Business Insider that Grok was not the "best at coding."

What Truell didn't mention in that X post was the bigger development: he had already agreed to a potential $60 billion acquisition of Cursor by SpaceX later this year.

The news surprised many Cursor employees, as Truell had previously talked about building Cursor for the long haul. One former employee said that whenever an acquisition was mentioned, Truell would say, "This is a huge risk, or a huge bet we are taking."

The structure of the deal is also unusual. According to SpaceX's S-1 filing last month, if either party decides not to proceed, SpaceX will pay Cursor a $1.5 billion termination fee, plus provide an additional $8.5 billion in free computing power.

Ali Partovi, an early investor in Cursor, is not privy to the internal details of the deal. He says that while many founders might claim they would never sell their company, in reality, they fall on a spectrum. Partovi believes Truell leans towards the end favoring independence.

"His ambition, confidence, and drive will push him more towards staying independent," Partovi said.

For now, Cursor remains independent and continues to grow rapidly. According to Forbes, its revenue doubled in three months to $4 billion.

Some early progress is already visible. Musk posted on X that a recent version of Grok had improved significantly after being trained on a "large amount" of Cursor data. Both Grok and Composer are climbing the charts in closely watched AI model rankings, benchmarks, though neither has yet reached the top.

For Musk, the goal is clear: his AI will become "very 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 remains quite open.

Truell stated in a recent interview that Cursor now has 700 employees and serves 60% of Fortune 500 companies. He added that the company can now be compared to many of the world's largest public software companies.

"It is indeed a bit crazy," he said, "and we are very aware of how special this is—how unprecedented it is from a historical perspective."

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