SpaceX Tried to Buy AI Coding Startup Cognition. Its CEO Says That's Not True.

Key points

• Cognition CEO Scott Wu publicly denied on Wednesday that SpaceX approached his company about an acquisition, calling the Bloomberg report inaccurate.
• Cognition raised $1 billion at a $25 billion valuation in late May 2025, and Bloomberg says it is now in early talks to raise new funding at a $40 billion valuation.
• SpaceX completed a $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, a rival AI coding tool, last week.
• SpaceX's AI company, xAI, went public in June 2025 with a peak market value of nearly $2.3 trillion.
• Bloomberg reports that even if a full buyout is off the table, the two companies may still work together, with Cognition using SpaceX's computing infrastructure.

Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter, that SpaceX had tried to acquire Cognition, the startup behind Devin, an AI coding agent (software that can carry out multi-step programming tasks on its own without a human steering every click). Cognition's CEO Scott Wu pushed back almost immediately, posting on X that the story was "inaccurate" and that his company "is not for sale."

SpaceX and Cognition both declined to comment to TechCrunch AI, which covered the story first.

Why does SpaceX want AI coding companies so badly?

AI-assisted coding is one of the clearest ways anyone has found to make serious money from AI right now. Elon Musk told SpaceX employees last week that in "four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value" of the company. To get there, SpaceX needs revenue, and AI coding tools are generating it.

Last week, SpaceX closed a $60 billion deal to buy Cursor, another AI coding assistant. Cursor and SpaceX jointly released Grok 4.6, a new AI model that scores well on tests measuring coding ability and complex multi-step tasks, earlier this month. Anthropic's rapid growth this year has been driven largely by Claude Code, its own coding assistant, which shows how much enterprise customers will pay to speed up software development.

Cognition would have added Devin, its AI coding agent, plus enterprise clients including Mercedes-Benz, Citi, and Goldman Sachs. That customer list matters. SpaceX's xAI unit is still early-stage and has struggled to win corporate customers, partly because its Grok chatbot has attracted repeated controversy.

What does Cognition actually look like right now?

The company is one of the last large independent AI coding startups still standing outside a big tech parent. It absorbed the remaining assets of Windsurf after Google DeepMind paid $2.4 billion in a deal focused on hiring Windsurf's leadership and licensing its research. After that merger, Cognition cut 30 jobs and offered buyouts to 200 remaining Windsurf staff, requiring those who stayed to work more than 80 hours a week and come into the office six days a week.

Its valuation has climbed fast. The $1 billion funding round it closed in late May 2025 valued it at $25 billion. Bloomberg now reports early talks for a fresh round at $40 billion.

Bloomberg says the acquisition talks are no longer active, but the two companies are still discussing a partnership, possibly with Cognition renting computing power from SpaceX. Wu did not address that specific claim in his denial.

One honest takeaway: if you use any AI coding tool at work, the company behind it is probably in acquisition talks or raising money at a valuation that has nothing to do with current profits. That is worth knowing when you are deciding how much to build around a single platform.