Just hours after his 4-year-old AI-coding startup was purchased by Elon Musk’s SpaceX for $60 billion on Tuesday, Cursor’s 25-year-old CEO Michael Truell took the stage at his company’s first-ever developer conference. 

A crowd of young techies — some in the front row still typing away on their laptops — packed the Fort Mason auditorium to hear the billionaire leader of San Francisco’s hottest AI startup speak. Truell wore a dark green crew-neck sweater, black jeans, and gray Hoka running shoes.

This deal is an early taste of the AI wealth coming to San Francisco. Following SpaceX’s lead, local companies Anthropic and OpenAI are also planning their own record-breaking IPOs in the coming year, which are expected to make hundreds of local employees into millionaires and a handful of executives into billionaires. The money from this AI boom will eclipse previous tech IPOs in the Bay Area and could further change the fabric of San Francisco. 

For Cursor, it’s a windfall for the young company’s roughly 800 employees across the Bay Area, New York and London, but particularly for Truell. 

Raised in New York City, Truell attended Horace Mann School, a private college-prep school in the Bronx. He went on to study computer science and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and interned at Google, according to his LinkedIn profile (opens in new tab).

It was at MIT that Truell met his three cofounders — Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger, and Arvid Lunnemark. The group left in 2022 and founded the company that same year.

The crowd at the conference, called Compile, also skewed young. Attendees mingled near the Cafe Cursor coffee bar and listened intently to the rotating cast of speakers. Event staff wore Carhartt vests with an embroidered Cursor logo on the breast. Many attendees carried around branded tote bags holding the sought-after swag of the event: a customizable computer keyboard made by Keychron, a brand favored by techies. 

In attendance was early Cursor employee Baltazar Zuñiga Ruiz, 23. When he heard the deal was going through, he and a colleague celebrated with a run from their office toward the Golden Gate Bridge. He’d interviewed at the company a couple of years ago when it was still based in Hayes Valley and joined when it had no more than 10 employees. He worked on the company’s early AI coding agent products.

While the company has since added hundreds of employees, he said some things have stayed consistent. The company’s workers are pretty “heads down” and focused on the work. They still have a rotation of local restaurants they like to order takeout from, such as Goop Kitchen, Papalote, and The Italian Homemade Company.

He declined to discuss how much stock he holds in the company and how this deal will impact his personal wealth. 

The purchase came days after SpaceX, which includes its AI wing, xAI, made its stock market debut with the largest initial public offering ever, turning Musk into the world’s first trillionaire in the process. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. 

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While investors have pumped billions of dollars into the AI boom, SpaceX’s purchase of Cursor is one of the largest major exits for a young AI startup. 

“We look forward to working closely with the SpaceX team to advance our frontier AI capabilities and continue to work closely with our customers and partners,” Truell said in an emailed statement.

The company’s appeal is how fast its product has been adopted, including by many Fortune 500 companies and millions of daily developers, said Franco Granda, a senior analyst at PitchBook, a firm that tracks private companies. Its platform for editing code using AI is one of the fastest-growing software products. “That kind of entrenched user base is something money usually can’t buy quickly.”

The acquisition wasn’t a surprise. SpaceX initially announced (opens in new tab) in April that it planned “to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.” The deal is expected to close during the third quarter, according to an SEC filing. (opens in new tab) 

“It validates the city as the center of gravity for applied AI, where a small team can build a globally significant company in a few years,” said Granda. “But a $60 billion all-stock exit into a Musk-controlled entity also raises the question of how many of these breakout startups stay independent versus getting absorbed by a handful of giants. The talent and the ideas are still being minted in San Francisco; the open question is who ends up owning them.”

When SpaceX agreed to acquire Anysphere, Cursor’s parent company, it effectively doubled the company’s previous valuation. The startup raised $2.3 billion during its most recent funding round in November, which valued the company at nearly $30 billion. Over the past two years, it’s been backed by major investors such as Accel, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Coatue Management.

The founders of Cursor initially worked out of an apartment on Octavia Street in Hayes Valley, before the company relocated last year to its current office in North Beach. Setting up shop in North Beach is not typical for most AI startups, many of which have congregated in SoMa or Dogpatch.

Similarly, Cursor’s workplace gained a unique reputation for its unconventional shoes-off office policy, which a company spokesperson said is optional. The SF office has a library filled with paper books and leather sofas. While the company is based here, it’s worked hard to have an international reach, hosting hackathons and branded coworking events around the world, like Cafe Cursor, in locations including Lagos, Nigeria; Nairobi, Kenya; Hanoi, Vietnam; Austin, Texas; and Medellín, Colombia, as well as near its own North Beach base. 

After the deal with SpaceX was announced, Zuñiga Ruiz said that everyone of course was “bullish and excited about the future,” but there was also an understanding that the work is just beginning. As part of the combination with SpaceX, Cursor said it gained access (opens in new tab) to xAI’s Colossus supercomputer to help train smarter AI models. 

“There’s still that culture of like, ‘keep working, you know, there’s more to be built,’ which I love,” he said. “What can we build next with all this compute?”