When SpaceX acquired AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion days after its record-breaking IPO, it put four MIT graduates in the global spotlight, and one Indian-American co-founder's journey from a New York teenager to Silicon Valley billionaire into sharp focus.
Aman Sanger, a 25-year-old Indian-American from New York, now belongs to that rare club of founders whose companies Elon Musk’s SpaceX wants to own. When SpaceX announced that it had formally agreed to acquire Cursor, the AI coding platform Sanger co-founded, in an all-stock deal worth $60 billion, it set off one of the biggest acquisition stories in the history of artificial intelligence.
Sanger began coding at 14. His father, Arvind Sanger, is an IIT Bombay alumnus and hedge fund professional, while his mother, Shilpa Sanger, is an orthodontist, entrepreneur, and board member of education-focused non-profit Pratham USA. Before MIT, he interned at both Bridgewater Associates and Google. At MIT, he met Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark, the three co-founders who would build Cursor alongside him. The four left university in 2022 to build what became one of the fastest-growing AI companies in history.
Cursor is an AI-powered coding platform that helps developers write and understand code, analysing entire codebases and generating complex solutions. It is used by 64% of Fortune 500 companies and teams at Nvidia, Adobe, and PayPal. Cursor crossed $1 billion in annualised revenue in November 2025 and reached about $4 billion by early June 2026.
SpaceX announced the acquisition just days after the rocket-maker debuted on the Nasdaq in the biggest IPO in history. The deal will see Cursor’s parent company Anysphere become a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX upon closing, expected in the third quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. Musk merged SpaceX with his AI startup xAI earlier this year, and the Cursor deal is set to help the company compete with rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI. Cursor’s market share had declined from 41% in June 2025 to about 26% in May, with Anthropic now controlling half of that category.
According to Forbes, Sanger’s net worth stood at approximately $1.3 billion before the acquisition, based on his estimated 4.5% stake in Cursor, a figure expected to rise significantly once the all-stock deal closes in Q3 2026.
Cursor crossed $100 million in annualised revenue without a single salesperson. Revenue came entirely from developers telling other developers. Sanger’s philosophy on building was equally direct. “The first version of Cursor Tab sucked, but once you release it to the world and see how people react to it, you can improve it a ton,” he said.
Reacting to the acquisition announcement on X, Sanger wrote, “Excited to train some very strong models!”
At 25, he is, by his own reckoning, just getting started. “I think we’re probably a bit more than 1% done but definitely less than 10%,” he said of the ambition to make it possible for anyone in the world to produce software.
Sources: CNBC; TechCrunch; CBS News; Forbes; The Motley Fool; Global Indian; American Bazaar; India New England News; Storyboard18.
“`