Days after SpaceX went public, Elon Musk’s tech giant announced plans to acquire Anysphere, the parent company of AI crypto agent Cursor, to… 60 billion dollars In the third quarter of this year. Behind Cursor are four former MIT colleagues in their mid-20s. All founders They became billionaires in November After a $2.3 billion financing round, the company was valued at $29.3 billion. With each holding a roughly 4.5% stake, the SpaceX acquisition would bring their net worth to about $2.7 billion each.
Michael Troll, Swaleh Asif, Arvid Lonemark, and Aman Sanger founded San Francisco-based Anysphere in 2022 after meeting at MIT. In just a few years, their flagship product, Cursor, has become a widely used tool for building AI encoders, which has now been certified by 64% of Fortune 500 companies, Including Nvidia, Adobe, and even competitor OpenAI. The global research company Gartner has classified it as Leader in enterprise coding tools Along with OpenAI, Anthropic, and GitHub.
The move comes nearly two months after Cursor, which has been working closely with xAI to integrate its technology into the Grok assistant, Granting exclusive acquisition rights to SpaceX, now xAI’s parent company. If the $60 billion deal falls through, SpaceX has agreed to pay Cursor 10 billion dollars For their cooperation. The deal caps the meteoric rise of a team that has gone from university classmates to major players in the AI race in just a few years.
Michael Troll, CEO
The 25-year-old co-founder and CEO attended the Horace Mann School in New York before joining MIT in 2018. He interned at Two Sigma, Google, and Octant before that. Leakage In 2021 to co-found Cursor. In 2020, Truell was recognized as an A.J New researcher Along with Aman Sanger, Neo later became one of the early investors in Cursor’s $400,000 pre-seed round.
“There will be an opportunity to change all aspects of programming in the next five years and for all software development to flow through paradigms.” Trull said in an interview for Y Combinator’s AI Startup School in San Francisco last year. “I felt like no one working in space at that time was taking this seriously.”
Sawaleh Asif, Head of Products Department
Originally from Pakistan, Asif attended the country’s most prestigious prep school, Nixor College, where he graduated as valedictorian in 2018. At MIT, he worked as a research assistant at the Supertech Laboratory and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
“In general, over a one- to two-year time frame, I expect the way people will code to change,” Asif He said in an interview With AI researcher and entrepreneur Lukas Biewald on his YouTube series Gradient Dissent last year. “In the short term, this sounds really scary, but it will be a gradual process and will be very natural for everyone.”
Aman Sanger, Chief Operating Officer
Sanger attended the Horace Mann School with Trowell before enrolling at MIT in 2018. He interned at Google and hedge fund giant Bridgewater Associates before graduating and was also named a Neo Scholar in 2020.
“A lot of the work that Cursor did was just trying out what was possible,” Sanger said He said in an interview With venture capitalist Rajan Anandan. “For every product you might see, there are ten failed experiments of what didn’t work.” Sanger said he started programming at the age of 14.
Arvid Lonemark, co-founder
Lonemark, 26, graduated from Malmö Borgarskola High School in Sweden in 2018 before attending MIT, where he worked at QuantCo, Stripe and trading company Jane Street. In October 2025, it was announced Departure from the indicator to I found a new projectIntegrous Research, focuses on building safer AI systems. He is reportedly retaining his founding stake, allowing him to benefit from a potential acquisition.
While still in stealth mode, Integrous Research says it is “dedicated to protecting individual human freedom before, during and after the beginning of the age of superintelligence” and believes that “by the time superintelligence can do this research for us, it may already be too late.”
