Elon Musk’s space exploration company is making a lot of headlines right now, especially as its stock goes up and down, but there’s a hidden gem in the SpaceX crown that I think deserves a lot more attention. We know names like Altman and Amodei, but what about Truell, Asif, Lunnemark, and Sanger?
These are the brains behind Cursor, an AI-native editor tool that was recently acquired by SpaceX, just days after the IPO. Cursor was originally the tool created by the firm called Anysphere that was founded in 2022 by the above four MIT students, and now has an enormous valuation as a division of the publicly traded star-climber.
In fact, tech media reported when this happened in June that the deal was for $60 billion, an all-stock acquisition. It turns out some existing shareholders were worried about dilution, but the rank and file largely went along anyway. There were also proponents, like Bill Ackman, who was quoted as saying: “the Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX’s high valuation.”
Anyway, now Cursor is part of SpaceX, and I think it behooves investors and others to be familiar with a company of this size and prominence.
What It Is
Essentially, experts explain, the Cursor people “forked” the operating system of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor, and made an AI-first design for processes like formatting and syntax handling.
Cursor also has AI chat and an agentic mode, as well as “codebase awareness,” or the ability to analyze an entire codebase, to bring that crucial context to any corner where new code is being written.
The utility of Cursor is broad.
Developers might use it to write, edit, debug, and refactor software with AI assistance. Cursor can bring a magnifying glass to a particular piece of code and explain its design. It can generate functions, automate repetitive programming tasks, and generally streamline a programmer or developer’s work. It can search entire codebases, create tests, fix bugs, and help build applications faster. Users might take advantage of this to help with anything in the DevOps pipeline, for instance, to accelerate reviews, documentation, and software maintenance.
They Did It
From humble beginnings, Cursor became a household name in AI, even if Anysphere is not.
A profile of the four founders on Founded.com provides this synopsis, and also, a photo of the young lads themselves:
“For founders and startup operators, Cursor’s trajectory underscores the value of deeply understanding user pain points and building with an AI-native mindset. Instead of layering AI on top of legacy tools, Cursor’s approach reimagines the developer experience from the ground up. Ultimately, Cursor’s breakthrough marks a pivotal moment in the AI-driven developer economy — where intelligent tools empower creators, and valuation spikes signal the soaring impact of next-generation software innovation.”
SpaceX Strategy
I was looking for an erudite explanation of what Cursor brings to the table for Grok/SpaceX, and it turns out our own Forbes writer Sandy Carter provided this coverage in June:
“For the past several months SpaceXAI and Cursor have been jointly training a model that will ship inside Cursor and Grok Build, handing Musk’s AI unit a distribution channel into millions of professional developers and a product that already wins daily usage.”
Then Carter adds:
“Cursor lives inside the workflow of expert software engineers, the exact users who decide which AI tools become standard. Pair that footprint with SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, reported at roughly one million H100 equivalents, and you get training scale plus a captive, high-value audience under one roof.”
I think that gives us a pretty good idea of implementation and strategy.
As for investor sentiment, head on over to Reddit, an you’ll get an earful. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
So what’s my point?
In this age, when AI is so ascendant, and companies are looking for ways to integrate it into everything, I think that secondary firms like Cursor should get more attention. Everyone is focused on about five or six firms: if I had to rattle them off, off the top of my head, it would be OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, and maybe Grok. We don’t pay as much attention to companies that are just outside of that circle, even if they are big-money firms with real contributions to the puzzle.
It’s sort of like in the early days of crypto, when the common person, reading broader tech media, only heard about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and maybe Ripple. But probably not Ripple. It took a long time for coins like Solana, Binance Coin, and many others to get a hearing, just because, when we consider something as complex and broadly distributed as crypto or AI, we want a simple narrative. But I think that Cursor and its ilk are going to be more famous as time goes on.
