Musk’s $60 billion Cursor bet has an Indian link: Meet 26-year-old Aman Sanger caught in Sam Altman feud

Elon Musk’s $60 billion acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor has turned its 26-year-old co-founder Aman Sanger into one of the most closely watched young entrepreneurs in the artificial intelligence boom. The blockbuster SpaceX deal has also drawn attention in India, owing to Sanger’s family roots and his father’s IIT Bombay background.

Sanger, who was born in the US to Indian immigrant parents, co-founded Cursor in 2022 after studying computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The startup rapidly grew into one of the most prominent AI coding companies before being acquired by Musk’s SpaceX, with Forbes estimating that each of its four co-founders received SpaceX shares worth about $2.4 billion at the close of the deal.

Also read: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk make plea at G20 for more AI data centers


The acquisition has also added a new dimension to Musk’s increasingly complicated rivalry with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. OpenAI recently ended its relationship with Cursor, citing Musk and contractual concerns involving companies associated with him.

From IIT Bombay roots to a multibillion-dollar AI exit

Sanger’s Indian connection runs through his father, Arvind Sanger, who graduated from IIT Bombay with a BTech degree in 1984 before moving to the US. He later earned an MBA from Tulane University and built a career on Wall Street.

His mother, Shilpa, became an angel investor through the Golden Seeds investment network and also took on a business management role at Geosphere Capital.

Aman Sanger began coding at 14 and later enrolled at MIT, where he studied computer science from 2018 to 2022. Before building Cursor, he interned at Google and Bridgewater Associates and launched an AI consultancy.

In 2022, he joined fellow MIT students Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark to co-found Cursor, an AI-powered code editing platform that would go on to become a major player in the rapidly expanding market for AI-assisted software development.

Forbes' latest estimate puts Sanger’s net worth at more than $2.5 billion.

Also read: Starlink would help the 'least served' in India: Elon Musk

Cursor’s meteoric rise meets the Musk-Altman feud

Cursor’s growth accelerated as companies and developers embraced AI tools capable of generating and editing software code. Before its acquisition by SpaceX, the company claimed annualised revenue of more than $1 billion.

Millions of developers at companies including Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, Shopify and PayPal use Cursor to generate and edit chunks of code, highlighting the scale the startup had reached before the $60 billion transaction.

The acquisition, however, has brought Cursor directly into the orbit of Musk’s broader battle with Altman.

Last week, OpenAI said it had pulled its models from Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026. OpenAI said the decision was not related to pricing, performance or usage limits, but to Musk.

OpenAI said X, formerly Twitter and now folded into SpaceX, had breached the terms of its contract after Musk took over the platform. It also cited sworn testimony this year in which Musk acknowledged that xAI, which is likewise now part of SpaceX, had violated OpenAI’s terms of service.

OpenAI further said its forthcoming model, Astra, would raise the bar for accountability, and that it preferred ending the arrangement rather than extending it to a partner it did not trust. The company said it had provided the maximum notice permitted under its contract to give developers time to prepare.

For Sanger, the $60 billion transaction marks a remarkable leap from an MIT computer science student and teenage coder to a billionaire at the centre of one of the AI industry's biggest corporate deals — while his Indian family background has added an unexpected connection to Musk’s latest technology bet.

(With inputs from ToI)