Elon Musk’s SpaceX has agreed to acquire AI coding company Cursor in a deal valuing the business at $60 billion, placing 25-year-old Indian-origin entrepreneur Aman Sanger and his three co-founders at the centre of one of the year’s major artificial intelligence transactions. The deal comes just four years after the company behind Cursor was founded by a group of young MIT engineers.
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Who Is Aman Sanger?
Sanger is one of the four co-founders of Anysphere, the company behind the AI coding platform Cursor. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he met fellow co-founders Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark.
According to the report, Sanger comes from a family with Indian roots. His father, Arvind Sanger, is an IIT Bombay alumnus who later worked in the hedge-fund industry, while his mother, Shilpa Sanger, is an orthodontist and entrepreneur.
Before building Anysphere, Sanger had spent time at Bridgewater Associates and Google and worked on his own AI consulting venture. He now serves as Anysphere’s chief operating officer.
How Did Four MIT Engineers Build Cursor?
Anysphere was founded in 2022 by Sanger, Asif, Truell and Lunnemark. Their early experiments were not necessarily aimed at creating the coding assistant that Cursor eventually became.
The founders explored AI applications, including computer-aided design, before turning their attention to software development. Their idea was to bring artificial intelligence directly into the coding environment instead of forcing programmers to move between a code editor and a separate AI chatbot.
Cursor is designed to work with larger portions of a developer’s codebase. It can help generate and modify code, identify bugs and carry out complex programming tasks using natural-language instructions.
The report also links the product to the rise of “vibe coding”, in which users describe what they want in ordinary language and allow AI to handle much of the coding work.
Why Did SpaceX Want Cursor?
SpaceX had already been working with Cursor before the acquisition. In April 2026, the companies announced a broader collaboration, with SpaceX securing an option to either acquire Cursor for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for a partnership if an acquisition did not proceed.
SpaceX ultimately chose the acquisition route.
The deal is also linked to Musk’s wider ambitions in artificial intelligence. SpaceX and Cursor had reportedly been working on a new AI model expected to be used across Cursor as well as Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Musk’s xAI.
The acquisition gives Musk’s AI ecosystem an established software product already used by developers, along with the team responsible for building it.
How Much Could Aman Sanger Be Worth After the Deal?
The $60 billion valuation has significantly increased the estimated wealth of Cursor’s founders. According to Forbes estimates cited in the report, Sanger, Sualeh Asif, Michael Truell and Arvid Lunnemark each hold roughly a 4.5% stake in Anysphere.
That would place the estimated value of each founder’s stake at around $2.7 billion following the acquisition.
The transaction will make Anysphere a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX, with Cursor shareholders receiving SpaceX Class A stock based on the $60 billion implied equity value, according to the report.
How Quickly Did Cursor Grow?
Anysphere’s rise came within a relatively short period. The company was founded in 2022 and raised $2.3 billion in its previous major funding round, reaching a valuation of about $29.3 billion.
Cursor has since been adopted by tens of thousands of teams. The report says engineering organisations at companies including Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, Shopify and PayPal use the product, while its platform was being used across 64% of Fortune 500 companies.
Within four years of Anysphere’s founding, the company has gone from an MIT-linked startup to a business valued at $60 billion as part of SpaceX’s expanding artificial intelligence ambitions.
About the author — Ayesha Aayat writes on cybercrime, digital safety, and emerging online threats. Her work focuses on public awareness, legal clarity, and technology-driven risks.
