Original Title: Inside Cursor's wild rise
Original Authors: Shubhangi Goel and Charles Rollet, Business Insider
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 still an MIT student when he completed a programming test in less than 10 minutes that was originally expected to take an hour. A few years later, he co-founded Anysphere with several MIT classmates and launched Cursor, attempting to redefine how developers write code. By the end of 2025, Cursor was being used by millions of developers, with revenue growing tenfold in less than a year, surpassing $1 billion.

However, Cursor's story is not just a Silicon Valley narrative of a "genius programmer's entrepreneurial success." The more noteworthy part of the article is that it sheds light on the structural dilemma of AI application companies: when a company is built on cutting-edge models, it can rapidly grow leveraging the model's capabilities, but it can also be quickly squeezed when the model supplier enters the field itself. This is precisely the case with Cursor and Anthropic. Cursor was highly reliant on Anthropic's models, and when Anthropic introduced Claude Code, the two went from partners to potential competitors, leading Cursor to start developing its in-house Composer models.

At the same time, Cursor's rapid growth has been accompanied by controversy. The article mentions that Cursor's hiring process is extremely rigorous, with candidates being required to participate in unpaid "work trials" for several days or even weeks. There have also been long-standing internal concerns about overreliance on a single AI model supplier. These details make Cursor's success appear more complex: it is not only one of the most representative application-layer companies in the AI programming wave but also a startup navigating between rapid expansion, extreme culture, and model dependency.

What truly propels the story into a new phase is Truell's tie-up with Elon Musk's SpaceX. To support its in-house models, Cursor needs expensive and scarce computing power, while SpaceX/xAI aims to enhance Grok's programming capabilities. On the surface, the collaboration is about computing power and data, model capabilities complementing each other; however, behind the scenes, there is a potential $60 billion acquisition arrangement. If the deal goes through, Cursor could become a key programming infrastructure within Musk's AI ecosystem. If it remains independent, it also has to prove that an AI application company can grow into a truly generational company amid the dominance of cutting-edge model giants.

The crux of this article is: Will Cursor become the gateway to the next generation of software companies, or will it be a piece in the AI giant's computational power play?

Below is the translated original text:

Michael Truell: From Prodigy Programmer to Cursor CEO

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

"He totally crushed that quiz," recalled tech investor Ali Partovi. Partovi ran a project specifically aimed at finding the world's best programmers at the undergraduate level. With a lot of time left, Partovi asked Truell to come up with a programming quiz for him in return. Partovi, a programmer himself who co-founded Code.org, took longer to complete the task. When he finished, his sheet of paper was messy; in contrast, the teenager's code was elegant and clear.

Today, 25-year-old Truell is the CEO of Cursor. This AI programming startup has reached a potential $600 billion acquisition agreement with Elon Musk's SpaceX. This slender, bushy-haired redhead is seen by colleagues as quietly friendly. Unlike some young founders who like to show off the latest revenue data or fitness achievements, he prefers to immerse himself in long hours of coding, almost like a form of meditation. Within Cursor, everyone knows that in the first few years of the company's founding, he did not pay himself a salary.

However, beneath his modest exterior, Truell has long harbored ambitions that rival anyone in Silicon Valley. He once told employees that he hopes Cursor will be a "generational company." In his youth, he developed a popular programming game with a theme of conquering the universe; fresh out of MIT, he and a few college friends challenged Microsoft in the code editor field and ultimately won. At Cursor, he leads an intense work culture: to find the perfect fit, the company puts candidates through complex and unpaid "work trials," sometimes lasting for weeks.

Becoming one of the fastest-growing startups in the tech industry is no easy feat. Cursor has always had to navigate a subtle and tense relationship with Anthropic. Anthropic used to be Cursor's main AI model supplier until this cutting-edge AI lab started releasing its highly popular programming tools. After Claude posed a survival threat to the company, Truell declared a state of emergency. Since then, he has increasingly tied Cursor's fate to Musk's newly public SpaceX. SpaceX is eager to win the AI race and holds billions of dollars' worth of computational resources.

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

Truell is now facing his biggest challenge yet: can the collaboration with Musk be successful? Regardless of the outcome, the Cursor CEO has already begun planning to ensure his company secures a place in computing history.

Truell grew up in New York City, where both of his parents were journalists. He was a gifted programmer from a young age and started promoting coding early on. At the age of 15, still a student at the elite Horace Mann school, he co-developed a programming game called Halite. The game taught coding basics by having players conquer territory on a grid. The project attracted thousands of users, many of whom had never coded before, mostly high school and college students, earning him a $10,000 prize from a top math association.

Upon entering MIT, he double-majored in computer science and mathematics and began conceptualizing entrepreneurial projects. Claire Shorall had helped run a startup boot camp Truell attended during his undergraduate years. She noted Truell's curiosity and humility left a lasting impression. At the time, he needed to make cold calls to doctors across the U.S. to validate an early startup idea. Truell had Shorall sit beside him and provide feedback on his communication skills as they made calls on a landline phone. The project, originally intended to be a ZocDoc competitor, ultimately did not succeed, but Shorall saw that Truell possessed more than just raw coding ability.

“I gave him advice — but it was obvious that he already had it.” she said.

After graduating in 2022, Truell co-founded Anysphere with MIT peers Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. Initially a code editing platform, they pivoted in less than 12 months to achieve recurring revenue of $1 million by building a more user-friendly alternative to Microsoft's open-source code editor, VS Code.

“Over the next few years, our mission is to increase the speed of programming by an order of magnitude while making it more enjoyable and creative,” Truell told TechCrunch at the time.

The Controversy Behind Rapid Growth: Unpaid Trials, Extreme Hiring, and Model Dependence

To achieve this mission, Cursor was officially launched in March 2023 and experienced rapid growth. It quickly gained popularity among developers and businesses who were eager to significantly increase their productivity. In 2024, Cursor revealed that its customer base had exceeded 40,000 and set a grand goal: to create a "magical" tool that could one day truly write all the software in the world.

"Code is undergoing a kind of beautiful transformation," the company wrote in a blog post at the time.

By the end of 2025, Cursor had been adopted by millions of developers. The company announced that its revenue had grown tenfold in less than a year, surpassing $1 billion.

Cursor's growth was extremely intense, a characteristic that was also reflected in the company's hiring process. Four former employees stated that Truell was heavily involved in recruitment. He often scouted top engineers on GitHub and X, then invited candidates to Cursor's spacious campus-like headquarters in San Francisco for a multi-day "on-site working interview."

During the interview period, candidates would do almost everything a regular employee would do: have lunch with the team, sit at a desk using a company computer, and complete a project based on a frozen version of Cursor's codebase.

"This really allows us to gain a lot of signals to assess whether the candidate has the raw technical abilities required to be successful in our environment," Truell said in a podcast last November.

However, some criticized these working interviews for being unpaid. One person who claimed to have interviewed at Cursor criticized this process as "exploitative and unethical" on Reddit.

A former employee recalled receiving an email late at night, instructing them to be at the Cursor office by 9 a.m. the next morning to complete a series of coding projects. In another instance, the former employee said that Cursor had a senior management candidate undergo a month-long working interview. During this period, the individual interacted with nearly every team member, but the company ultimately decided not to hire them.

"After a month was over, their attitude was, 'We might be able to find someone better than this candidate,'" the former employee said. He believed this both demonstrated Cursor's high standards for new hires and showed that the screening mechanism was indeed effective.

Despite Cursor's staggering growth rate, its executives have long been concerned that the company has become overly reliant on a single AI provider. Employees often used one word to describe Cursor's relationship with Anthropic: peculiar.

The two companies are highly interdependent. Cursor relies heavily on Anthropic's AI model to power its programming tool. At the same time, Anthropic greatly benefits from Cursor's explosive growth. According to an employee familiar with the numbers, at an early stage, Cursor contributed approximately 40% to 50% of Anthropic's revenue.

"Both sides to some extent realize that they need each other. We brought in a significant amount of revenue for Anthropic," another employee said, "But at the same time, Anthropic has its own competing products."

Prior to launching its flagship code editor, Claude Code, Anthropic executives had privately assured Cursor management that the product was more like a research project than a major business advancement. An insider said the two sides had communicated about this. However, Claude Code quickly gained popularity among developers. By February 2026, its annualized revenue had grown to $25 billion, approximately $5 billion higher than Cursor's annualized revenue at the 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's executives had already been concerned about the company's reliance on Anthropic. One reason was that Anthropic had cut off its services to Windsurf, a competitor AI programming startup, during acquisition talks with OpenAI.

On January 5, Truell held an all-hands meeting described by an employee as an "emergency meeting" and announced that Cursor needed to build its own AI model. Two employees said the message at the time was very clear: we must ensure we are not left behind. The company will cancel all unnecessary meetings, and you may be temporarily reassigned to work with different teams this week. We must stay flexible and adapt quickly to change.

Following the meeting, Cursor began a lengthy pricing analysis, comparing Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, while also holding meetings to reassure the company's largest clients. Executives also concluded that Cursor must double down on developing its own models to reduce reliance on cutting-edge model labs and gain more pricing control.

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

Cursor's High-Stakes Gamble: Escaping Anthropic, Partnering with Musk

Following this, Cursor unveiled Composer, its proprietary programming-oriented model. Composer is built on top of China's AI lab Moonshot's open-source model. It has started to gain traction among developers. Cursor claims that in the Composer 2.5 model released in May of this year, over 85% of it is derived from Cursor's own work — meaning that the underlying Moonshot model only constitutes a small part of the final product.

"Composer has received extremely positive feedback," said Cursor engineer Lucas Garza. This is mainly attributed to its low cost and speed, especially against the backdrop of rising AI costs and tech companies' engineering budgets under pressure.

Cursor's latest tool is also sparking new excitement. On a hot afternoon in June, Cafe Cursor in San Francisco's North Beach tourist district might be the busiest café in the entire neighborhood. This pop-up café operated by Cursor is handing out lattes and $50 credits to enthusiastic entrepreneurs for free. Many are praising Cursor for boosting their productivity.

This month, tech practitioners are seen lounging in Cursor's pop-up café, Cafe Cursor. Charles Rollet/Business Insider

Aneesh Dharani founded an AI flashcard startup. He said that despite not having a software engineering background, Cursor helped him bring the product to life. Another founder, Devon Lim, mentioned that he used Cursor to replace an outsourced engineer who had previously suddenly "disappeared" and stopped working for his sales-focused startup.

However, building and running a top-tier AI model is extremely costly, and Cursor itself doesn't have enough chips to do it entirely on its own. Therefore, this spring, Truell and his company found another founder with equally "interstellar ambitions" to fill this gap: Elon Musk.

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

“Excited to collaborate with the SpaceX team to expand Composer. This is a significant step on our journey to create the optimal environment for AI programming,” he wrote.

At first glance, this deal appears beneficial for both parties. Cursor gains access to SpaceX's vast computing resources, including Colossus – a supercomputer powered by hundreds of thousands of top-of-the-line Nvidia AI chips. At the same time, SpaceX's Grok receives a boost in the AI programming competition. A former xAI contractor once told Business Insider that Grok is not the “best at programming” model.

What Truell did not mention in that X post is a more significant development: he has agreed that later this year SpaceX may acquire Cursor for $600 billion.

This news has caught many Cursor employees off guard, as Truell had previously talked about building Cursor for the long term. A former employee said that whenever acquisition was brought up, Truell would say, “This is a huge risk we are taking, or a huge bet we are making."

The structure of this deal is also highly unusual. According to SpaceX's S-1 filing last month, if either party decides not to proceed with the transaction, SpaceX will pay Cursor a $15 billion termination fee and additionally provide $85 billion worth of free computing power.

Ali Partovi was one of Cursor’s earliest investors but is not privy to the inner workings of this deal. He mentioned that while many entrepreneurs claim they would never sell their company, in reality, they fall along a spectrum. Partovi believes Truell leans more towards the end of wanting to remain independent.

“His ambition, confidence, and drive would lead him more towards staying independent,” Partovi said.

Currently, Cursor remains independent and continues to grow rapidly. According to Forbes, its revenue doubled in three months, reaching $40 billion.

Some early progress has been made. Musk previously posted on X that the recent version of Grok saw significant improvements after training on a “large amount” of Cursor data. Grok and Composer are both gradually rising in the highly-watched AI model leaderboard – the benchmark tests – although they have not yet reached the top.

For Musk, the goal is clear: his AI will somehow become "very powerful."

"Whether it will become the most powerful remains to be seen, but I will never give up," he wrote on X, "Never."

For Cursor, the ultimate goal is not so clear, as the transaction 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. He also said that the company can now be compared to many of the world's largest publicly traded software companies.

"It's 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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