Cognition CEO denies Bloomberg report that SpaceX tried to acquire the startup

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Elon Musk's SpaceX attempted to acquire AI coding startup Cognition, citing sources familiar with the matter — a report that Cognition CEO Scott Wu swiftly denied. Wu wrote on X that the story was inaccurate, that Cognition "is not for sale," and that the two companies have not been in talks. The report lands days after SpaceX closed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, another AI coding startup, with the deal wrapping up last week. SpaceX acquired Musk's AI company xAI earlier this year and went public in a blockbuster June IPO, with its market capitalization peaking near $2.3 trillion. SpaceX has pitched investors on AI ambitions that include eventually building data centers in space, but the xAI business remains relatively early-stage and has fallen behind competitors. It has also had to contend with Grok's controversies as it courts enterprise customers. Musk told SpaceX employees last week that in about "four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value" of the company, underscoring how central AI is to SpaceX's future. AI-assisted coding has become one of the clearest ways to monetize the technology, with Anthropic's growth on the back of Claude Code cited as proof. Cursor and SpaceX jointly released Grok 4.6 this month, a model that scores higher on benchmarks for coding and complex multi-step agentic tasks. Cognition's coding agent Devin and its enterprise customer base — including Mercedes-Benz, Citi, and Goldman Sachs — would have given SpaceX another route deeper into enterprise AI coding. Bloomberg reports the deal talks are no longer active, but the companies are still discussing working together, potentially with Cognition using SpaceX's computing capacity, which SpaceX sells to other AI players such as Anthropic. Cognition remains one of the largest independent AI coding startups. It raised $1 billion at a $25 billion valuation in late May, and Bloomberg reports early talks for a new round at a $40 billion valuation.