Bloomberg reports SpaceX tried to buy Cognition, Scott Wu denies

Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace venture, was in talks to acquire the coding startup Cognition in an effort to narrow gaps with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in the artificial-intelligence race, but Cognition chief executive Scott Wu quickly denied on X that the company “is not for sale” and said no discussions had taken place between the parties. Bloomberg added that the talks are no longer active, though the parties remain open to collaboration, including a possible arrangement in which Cognition would tap SpaceX’s computing power — power the firm currently sells to other players like Anthropic until it needs it itself — a point Wu did not address in his denial.

The report follows SpaceX’s $60 billion purchase of Cursor, a rival coding startup, and earlier this year its acquisition of xAI, Musk’s own AI company, which went public in June and lifted its market capitalization to about $2.3 trillion; SpaceX markets a vision of space-based data centers, yet xAI remains in early stages and trails competitors, while its chatbot Grok has weathered controversies ranging from a “MechaHitler” incident last year to scandals over non-consensual sexual imagery this year, complicating enterprise customer acquisition.

Musk told SpaceX employees that in four to five years AI would account for 99 % of the company’s valuation, but achieving that requires a dramatic jump in AI-related revenue, and model-assisted coding has emerged as a clear monetization path, as Anthropic’s meteoric growth, largely driven by Claude Code, demonstrates; the Cursor acquisition fit that equation, the firms had already collaborated before the deal closed, and this month they jointly launched Grok 4.6, a model that outperforms on coding benchmarks and multi-step agentic tasks. Adding Cognition and its code agent Devin to the mix, alongside an enterprise client roster that includes Mercedes-Benz, Citi and Goldman Sachs, would give SpaceX another lever in the battle for the corporate sector.

Cognition remains one of the largest independent coding companies not yet absorbed by a major model maker; last month it raised $1 billion at a post-money valuation of $25 billion, and Bloomberg now reports early talks for a new round at $40 billion; last year Cognition acquired assets of competitor Windsurf after Google DeepMind executed an acqui-hire of Windsurf’s CEO and senior researchers in a talent-and-license deal worth $2.4 billion, after which Cognition cut 30 jobs, offered severance packages to the remaining 200 employees, and required those who stayed to meet strict operational expectations of more than 80 hours of work per week and six days in the office.

The extreme “war-time” work ethic is not foreign to Musk, who has said he works up to 120 hours per week and sometimes sleeps on office or factory floors; SpaceX and Cognition did not respond to requests for comment.