Cursor’s $60 billion empire: The Taiwan touch—how Huang Shaoru went from taking a leave of absence to becoming a founding engineer

SpaceX announces the full stock acquisition of AI code editor Cursor, implying a valuation of 60 billion USD. The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026.

On June 16, SpaceX, through its subsidiary X67, signed a merger agreement with Cursor's parent company Anysphere, acquiring Cursor entirely with stock, corresponding to an implied equity value of 60 billion USD (about NT$1.89 trillion); Cursor shareholders will receive SpaceX Class A shares. The transaction is scheduled to complete in Q3 2026, pending regulatory approval and other closing conditions.

Image source: X/@SpaceX

Who is Michael Truell?

Truell was born into a family of New York journalists. At age 15, he created the game Halite, which teaches programming, attracting thousands of students who had never coded before, and won a $10k prize from the top mathematics association (about NT$310k).

In 2019, at age 18, Truell took a one-hour coding test at the Computer History Museum café and finished it in less than 10 minutes. Investor Ali Partovi recalls that the neat code left by the young man made him, a co-founder of Code.org, feel inferior.

Image source: Cursor CEO Michael Truell

Achieving a million in revenue in 12 months, competing with Microsoft in 3 years

After graduating from MIT in 2022, Truell co-founded Anysphere with classmates. By developing a version of open-source editor VS Code that is better than Microsoft's, they reached an annual recurring revenue of $1 million (about NT$31.5 million) within 12 months.

Cursor launched in March 2023, and by 2024, it had over 40k customers; by the end of 2025, revenue grew tenfold within a year, surpassing $1 billion (about NT$31.5 billion).

According to Forbes, Cursor’s recent annualized revenue (ARR) doubled to $4 billion (about NT$126 billion). It now serves 60% of the Fortune 500 companies, with 700 employees.

Rapid expansion is also reflected in Truell personally overseeing recruitment. He scouts top engineers on GitHub and X, then subjects candidates to multi-week "work trials." Some applicants have criticized this process on Reddit as "exploitive and unethical."

One candidate underwent a month-long trial, meeting nearly every team member, only to be told, "We should be able to find someone better."

The Taiwanese figure behind the $60 billion empire: early Cursor engineer Huang Shaoru

However, this rigorous testing process also brought in a Taiwanese face: Huang Shaoru (Ian Huang), one of Cursor’s early engineers.

Huang attended Taipei American School, then studied electrical and computer engineering at UIUC. His father is NTU Electrical Engineering professor Huang Zhongyang.

His Silicon Valley ticket was a Minecraft project called MineJS, rewritten from scratch in JavaScript during high school. The project accumulated over 2,700 stars on GitHub and once topped the weekly trending list. Although later taken down by Microsoft due to copyright issues, Huang said, "Even if that project was taken down, I still deeply love building things." (He later open-sourced a voxel game engine called Voxelize.)

It’s understood that Huang, as an early heavy user of Cursor and with a prominent GitHub profile, caught Truell’s attention, who personally wrote him a cover letter.

After two rounds of online interviews, Huang flew to San Francisco for a week-long work trial, and received an offer immediately after. At that time, Cursor had only about 7 employees, and Huang dropped out of college to join full-time.

Image source: Zeng Linghuai photography, Cursor founding engineer Huang Shaoru

Today, this acquisition implies a $60 billion implied equity value, and Huang’s LinkedIn title is Founding Engineer. He is also listed in Cursor’s official blog early team introduction (notably for his voxel engine Voxelize).

Interestingly, Huang’s father, Huang Zhongyang, recently clarified on Facebook that, contrary to a Business Insider report claiming Cursor’s trial was unpaid, it was actually paid. Additionally, Cursor’s self-developed models did not start in 2026; its own model suite, Composer, was released earlier.

Anthropic’s "strange" co-existence pushes self-built models

Cursor moves fast but has long been dependent on a single AI provider. Employees often describe their relationship with Anthropic as "strange."

The two are highly interdependent: Cursor’s tools are driven by Anthropic models. According to an employee familiar with the matter, early on, Cursor contributed about 40-50% of Anthropic’s revenue.

But when Anthropic launched its own popular tool, Claude Code, the balance was broken. Bloomberg first reported that by February 2026, Claude Code’s run-rate revenue had grown to $2.5 billion (about NT$78.8 billion), surpassing Cursor by about $500 million (NT$15.8 billion). Developers began publicly canceling Cursor subscriptions in favor of Claude Code.

In fact, according to Cursor’s official blog, it introduced its first proprietary programming model, Composer, with Cursor 2.0 on October 29, 2025. On January 5 this year, Truell held an "emergency" all-hands meeting, emphasizing the need to fully develop in-house AI models to avoid falling behind, effectively doubling down on self-research.

Since then, Composer has iterated continuously. On May 18, Composer 2.5 was released, based on Moonshot’s open-source checkpoint Kimi K2.5. Cursor also announced collaboration with SpaceXAI, utilizing the Colossus 2 supercomputer to train larger-scale models from scratch.

Image source: X/@cursor_ai

However, in a recent interview, Truell still described the relationship with Anthropic as a "deep partnership," "a relationship we are truly grateful for."

Investing in Musk: a century-long gamble for computing power

Building top-tier models is extremely costly. Cursor lacks the chips to support this independently, so this spring, they approached Musk’s team, which shares similar ambitions.

On April 21, Truell announced on X that they would collaborate with SpaceX to expand Composer, leveraging the Colossus supercomputer’s computing power, driven by hundreds of thousands of Nvidia AI chips.

Image source: X/@mntruell

This is essentially a mutually beneficial deal: Cursor gains the computing power needed for self-developed models; Musk’s AI model Grok (once rated by an xAI contractor as "not the best at coding") can leverage Cursor’s data and products to strengthen its coding capabilities.

However, that April post only mentions the computing collaboration. Behind the scenes, there are bigger plans. Before the official signing, SpaceX’s S-1 filing (IPO prospectus, not financial report) revealed a structured acquisition option: if either party decided not to proceed, SpaceX would pay Cursor $890B (about NT$10k) breakup fee, plus an additional $8.5 billion (about NT$267.8 billion) in deferred services fees (essentially, the computing power SpaceX provides).

By June 16, the option was exercised as a merger: according to SpaceX’s 8-K filing that day, SpaceX, via its subsidiary X67, signed a merger agreement with Anysphere to acquire Cursor entirely with stock, implying a valuation of $60 billion, expected to close in Q3.

Elon Musk stated on X that Grok has made significant progress after training on "massive" Cursor data, and both Grok and Composer are climbing the benchmarks (model performance rankings) that everyone watches closely, though neither has yet reached the top. For Musk, the goal is clear: "Whether it’s the best or not remains to be seen, but I will never give up."

Now that the deal is signed, the remaining variables depend on regulatory approval and whether the closing can proceed on schedule.

• This article is reprinted with permission from 《Digital Age》
• Original title: 《SpaceX Acquires Cursor! Behind the $60 Billion Heavyweight Deal, How Did Taiwan’s Huang Shaoru Become a Founding Engineer with a GitHub Resume?》
• Original author: Li Xiantai