Michael Truell
Michael Truell is an American software engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded and serves as CEO of Cursor, an AI-assisted coding environment company. He studied computer science and mathematics at MIT, where he met his co-founders, and launched Cursor in 2022. He is best known for leading Cursor through rapid growth to over $1 billion in annualized revenue and its acquisition by SpaceX in June 2026 in a $60 billion all-stock deal.
“90% of the meeting was him saying no to things... Michael literally just sat there and very politely listened to all the questions and said, hmm, interesting. No, we're not going to do that.”
Source→“Imagine you are Michael at Cursor, right? And things are going pretty well. You've got a term sheet from, you're what, 24? You're a paper decabillionaire... I would much rather initially work for Elon than for Zuck personally.”
Source→“Elon has the biggest advantage, which is his stock is trading... it's still 40 times revenues. Picking up a big asset at 15 times current revenues, maybe less than 10 times year-end revenues. Dirt cheap for him, right? A net accretive day one in a way that probably wouldn't be as true for Meta.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.