Cursor’s 25-year-old CEO is a former Google intern who just inked a $60 billion deal with SpaceX

Cursor’s 25-year-old CEO Michael Truell helped take the AI coding company from a college passion project to a potential $60 billion acquisition by Elon Musk’s SpaceX . On Tuesday, SpaceX announced in a post on X that Cursor gave SpaceX the right to acquire the company later this year for $60 billion. If SpaceX doesn’t buy Cursor, it will pay $10 billion for their work together, the company said. Either way, it’s a big win for Truell, who just a few years after dropping out of MIT is worth an estimated $1.3 billion, according to Forbes . His and Cursor’s rapid rise is among Silicon Valley’s biggest success stories . Who is Michael Truell? Truell grew up in New York City and attended the Horace Mann School, a private prep school in the Bronx. He’d always had an interest in technology, and started coding at age 11 to make his own mobile games, he told Fortune ’s Allie Garfinkle. By age 18, Truell had just wrapped up his first year at MIT and was completing a summer internship at Google . During this time, he worked on “language models for feed ranking,” according to his profile on LinkedIn . Truell met Ali Partovi, an early investor in Facebook and Airbnb , during his internship, as Partovi was recruiting for his Neo Scholars program, an accelerator for young tech talent. Truell immediately impressed him by completing a written coding test “in record time,” Forbes reported . After he left that meeting, Partovi put a star with a circle next to his name on a list of potential Neo Scholar candidates, meaning “he was so impressed that he’d invest in any project Truell pursued,” according to Forbes . Truell later became a Neo Scholar, one of only 30 selected each year . When he started Cursor, Partovi became one of the company’s first investors. How Truell founded Cursor Truell and his MIT classmates Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark were interested in AI before OpenAI changed the industry by launching ChatGPT in 2022. A year before that, the Cursor cofounders …