Cognition CEO Scott Wu denied a Bloomberg report claiming that SpaceX attempted to acquire the AI coding startup. Wu posted on X that the story was inaccurate, that Cognition is not for sale, and that the two companies have not been in talks. Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported the acquisition attempt on Wednesday as SpaceX works to close ground on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI race.
The report surfaced days after SpaceX closed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, another AI coding company. SpaceX purchased Musk’s AI firm, xAI, earlier this year, then went public in a blockbuster IPO in June, with its market capitalization peaking at nearly $2.3 trillion. Bloomberg says the deal talks between SpaceX and Cognition are no longer active, but the companies are still discussing collaboration, possibly involving Cognition using SpaceX’s computing capacity, which SpaceX sells to other AI players like Anthropic until it needs that capacity itself. Wu did not address that specific claim in his denial.
SpaceX has pitched investors on AI ambitions that include building data centers in space, but the xAI business remains early-stage and has fallen behind its competitors. The company has also dealt with controversies tied to its Grok chatbot, including last year’s “MechaHitler” incident and this year’s scandals over nonconsensual sexual imagery, as it tries to court enterprise customers. Last week, Musk told SpaceX employees that in about four or five years, AI will represent 99 percent of the company’s value, but pulling that off will require much more revenue from AI.
AI-assisted coding has become a clear monetization path for the technology, with Anthropic’s growth largely driven by Claude Code. Bringing Cursor into the fold was part of that strategy, and the companies were already working together before the deal closed. This month, Cursor and SpaceX jointly released Grok 4.6, a model that scores higher on benchmarks for coding and complex multi-step agentic tasks.
Adding Cognition and its coding agent Devin, along with an enterprise customer base including Mercedes-Benz, Citi, and Goldman Sachs, would have given SpaceX another route to deepen its push into AI coding and compete for enterprise business. Cognition remains one of the largest independent AI software coding startups not yet absorbed by a major AI model maker. The company raised a $1 billion round at a $25 billion post-money valuation in late May, and Bloomberg reports it is now in early talks for a new round at a $40 billion valuation.
Cognition made headlines last year when it acquired the remaining assets of competitor Windsurf after Google DeepMind acqui-hired the startup’s CEO and top research in a $2.4 billion deal for talent and licensing rights. After the merger, Cognition laid off 30 employees and offered buyouts to the remaining 200 Windsurf employees. Those who stayed faced strict operational expectations, including a workweek of more than 80 hours and six days in the office, a wartime ethic that would not be out of place at a Musk company, given Musk has said he works up to 120 hours a week and often sleeps on office or factory floors.
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