Published Jun. 18, 2026at6:00am<\/p>\n
Just hours after his 4-year-old AI-coding startup was purchased by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX for $60 billion on Tuesday, Cursor\u2019s 25-year-old CEO Michael Truell took the stage at his company\u2019s first-ever developer conference.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A crowd of young techies \u2014 some in the front row still typing away on their laptops \u2014 packed the Fort Mason auditorium to hear the billionaire leader of San Francisco\u2019s hottest AI startup speak. Truell wore a dark green crew-neck sweater, black jeans, and gray Hoka running shoes.<\/p>\n
This deal is an early taste of the AI wealth coming to San Francisco. Following SpaceX\u2019s 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 <\/a>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.\u00a0<\/p>\n For Cursor, it\u2019s a windfall for the young company\u2019s roughly 800 employees across the Bay Area, New York and London, but particularly for Truell.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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)<\/a>.<\/p>\n It was at MIT that Truell met his three cofounders \u2014 Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger, and Arvid Lunnemark. The group left in 2022 and founded the company that same year.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n In attendance was early Cursor employee Baltazar Zu\u00f1iga 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\u2019d 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\u2019s early AI coding agent products.<\/p>\n While the company has since added hundreds of employees, he said some things have stayed consistent. The company\u2019s workers are pretty \u201cheads down\u201d 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.<\/p>\n He declined to discuss how much stock he holds in the company and how this deal will impact his personal wealth.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s first trillionaire in the process. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n Have thoughts on this story?Start the conversation<\/p>\n While investors have pumped billions of dollars into the AI boom, SpaceX\u2019s purchase of Cursor is one of the largest major exits for a young AI startup.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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,\u201d Truell said in an emailed statement.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s 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. \u201cThat kind of entrenched user base is something money usually can\u2019t buy quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n The acquisition wasn\u2019t a surprise. SpaceX initially announced (opens in new tab)<\/a> in April that it planned \u201cto acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.\u201d The deal is expected to close during the third quarter, according to an SEC filing. (opens in new tab)<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt 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,\u201d said Granda. \u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n When SpaceX agreed to acquire Anysphere, Cursor\u2019s parent company, it effectively doubled the company\u2019s 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\u2019s been backed by major investors such as Accel, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Coatue Management.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Similarly, Cursor\u2019s workplace gained a unique reputation for its unconventional shoes-off office policy<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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 Medell\u00edn, Colombia, as well as near its own North Beach base.\u00a0<\/p>\n After the deal with SpaceX was announced, Zu\u00f1iga Ruiz said that everyone of course was \u201cbullish and excited about the future,\u201d 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)<\/a> to xAI\u2019s Colossus supercomputer to help train smarter AI models.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s still that culture of like, \u2018keep working, you know, there\u2019s more to be built,\u2019 which I love,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat can we build next with all this compute?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published Jun. 18, 2026at6:00am Just hours after his 4-year-old AI-coding startup was purchased by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2007,32135,1611,36209,101,103,102,104,106,105,18174],"class_list":["post-365688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-ai","tag-boom-loop","tag-elon-musk","tag-moguls","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-spacex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}