Elon Musk's SpaceX acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion has turned its founders and early investors into multi-billionaires.
SpaceX has said it will take over Anysphere, the parent company of Cursor, which builds an AI coding agent used to help developers write software using artificial intelligence.
Among those benefiting from the deal are India-origin Aman Sanger (25) and 26-year-old Asif from Pakistan. Both of them are associated with Cursor's founding team. Aman serves as Anysphere's Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Asif serves as Anysphere's Chief Product Officer (CPO).
Cursor was founded in 2022 by Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, Michael Truell, and Arvid Lunnemark. Each of the four founders owns around a 4.5 per cent stake in the company. With this buyout, the deal would double the net worths of Cursor's four young billionaire cofounders to $2.7 billion each, according to Forbes estimates.
The buyout deal has not only benefitted its founders but also big investment firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive, whose stakes are worth around $6 billion and $4.2 billion, respectively.
According to Forbes, the company's annualised revenue rose from $2 billion in February to $3 billion in April and crossed $4 billion in June. The Cloud Agents feature has led to the company's immense growth. This feature can work on complicated coding tasks in the background for hours.
Cursor and SpaceX first started working together in April. At that time, SpaceX secured the right to buy Cursor for $60 billion.SpaceX would have been required to provide $8.5 billion worth of computer resources and pay a $1.5 billion breakup fee if the deal had failed.
SpaceX and Cursor have been collaborating to build a new AI model from the last few months. According to SpaceX, this model is expected to be used in both Cursor's coding software and Grok, the AI chatbot developed by SpaceX-owned xAI.
