Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Elon Musk’s SpaceX explored acquiring AI coding startup Cognition as part of efforts to catch up with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI race. Shortly after the story published, Cognition CEO Scott Wu disputed the report on X, calling it inaccurate, stating that Cognition "is not for sale," and adding that the two companies had not been in acquisition talks.
Recent context
The Bloomberg item followed SpaceX’s roughly $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, another AI coding startup; that deal closed last week. Earlier this year SpaceX acquired Musk’s AI company xAI, which went public in June and briefly reached a peak market capitalization near $2.3 trillion.
SpaceX has pitched ambitious AI plans to investors — including the long-term idea of building data centers in space — but xAI is still relatively early-stage and has fallen behind competitors. xAI’s chatbot Grok has also faced controversies, from last year’s "MechaHitler" incident to this year’s nonconsensual sexual imagery scandals, complicating efforts to attract enterprise customers.
Why Cognition would matter
AI-assisted coding is one of the clearest paths to monetization for generative AI; Anthropic’s rapid growth, driven in part by Claude Code, illustrates that. Acquiring Cursor was part of SpaceX’s strategy: Cursor and SpaceX were already collaborating before the acquisition closed, and the two companies jointly released Grok 4.6 this month, a model that scores higher on coding and complex multi-step agentic task benchmarks.
Adding Cognition — including its coding agent Devin and an enterprise customer base that counts Mercedes-Benz, Citi, and Goldman Sachs — would have given SpaceX another route into AI coding revenue and enterprise sales.
Talks, cooperation, and compute capacity
Bloomberg reports that acquisition talks are no longer active but that the companies are still discussing potential cooperation — possibly involving Cognition using SpaceX’s compute capacity. SpaceX has been selling computing power to other AI players, such as Anthropic, until it needs that capacity for its own purposes. In his denial, Wu did not address this specific claim about compute sharing.
Cognition’s position and recent history
Cognition remains one of the largest independent AI software coding startups not yet acquired by a major model maker. The company raised a $1 billion funding round in late May at a $25 billion post-money valuation, and Bloomberg says it is in early talks for a new funding round that could value it at $40 billion.
Last year Cognition acquired the remaining assets of competitor Windsurf after Google DeepMind acqui-hired Windsurf’s CEO and lead researchers in a $2.4 billion deal for talent and licensing rights. Following that merger, Cognition laid off 30 employees and offered buyouts to the remaining approximately 200 Windsurf staff; those who stayed reportedly faced strict operational expectations such as 80+ hour workweeks and six days in the office.
That kind of intense, wartime work ethic echoes public accounts of Elon Musk’s practices: Musk has said he sometimes works up to 120 hours a week and often sleeps on office or factory floors.
SpaceX and Cognition did not respond to requests for comment.
