Cognition CEO denies Bloomberg report of SpaceX acquisition bid

Elon Musk’s SpaceX attempted to acquire AI coding startup Cognition as it works to catch up to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI race, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Cognition CEO Scott Wu disputed the report soon after, writing on X that the story was inaccurate, that Cognition “is not for sale,” and that the two companies haven’t been in talks.

The report follows SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, another AI coding startup, which closed last week. SpaceX acquired Musk’s AI company xAI earlier this year, then went public in June in an IPO that pushed its market capitalization to nearly $2.3 trillion at its peak. Musk told SpaceX employees last week that AI will be “99% of the value” of the company in about four or five years, though achieving that will require SpaceX to pull in significantly more AI revenue. The xAI business remains relatively early-stage and has faced controversy over its Grok chatbot, including last year’s “MechaHitler” incident and this year’s nonconsensual sexual imagery scandals, as SpaceX tries to win over enterprise customers.

Bloomberg reports the acquisition talks are no longer active, but that the companies are still discussing working together — potentially with Cognition using SpaceX’s computing capacity, which SpaceX currently sells to other AI players including Anthropic until it needs that capacity for itself. Wu didn’t address that specific claim in his denial. Adding Cognition, its coding agent Devin, and its enterprise customer base — which includes Mercedes-Benz, Citi, and Goldman Sachs — would have deepened SpaceX’s push into AI coding and enterprise customers, an area where Cursor and SpaceX already jointly released the Grok 4.6 model this month.

Cognition raised a $1 billion round in late May at a $25 billion post-money valuation, and Bloomberg reports it’s now in early talks for a new round at a $40 billion valuation. The company acquired the remaining assets of competitor Windsurf last year after Google DeepMind acqui-hired Windsurf’s CEO and top researchers in a $2.4 billion deal; Cognition then laid off 30 Windsurf employees and offered buyouts to the remaining 200, with those who stayed facing a more than 80-hour workweek and six days in the office.

Why it matters

Whether or not the SpaceX approach was real, the report underscores how aggressively AI labs and their backers are consolidating coding-agent startups — and how contested Cognition’s independence has become as it seeks a new round at nearly double its May valuation.