SpaceX CEO Scott Wu denied reports that the company attempted to acquire Cognition, an AI coding startup, in a bid to strengthen its position in the AI race. The report, published by Bloomberg, claimed SpaceX sought to buy Cognition to catch up with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Wu responded on X, calling the report inaccurate and stating that Cognition is not for sale, with no talks between the companies. The report comes a few days after SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, another AI coding startup, whose deal closed last week. SpaceX also acquired Musk’s AI company, xAI, earlier this year, which went public in a blockbuster IPO in June, reaching a market cap of nearly $2.3 trillion at its peak. SpaceX has sold investors on its AI ambitions, including building data centers in space, but the xAI business remains early-stage and has fallen behind competitors. It also faces challenges with its chatbot Grok, which has been involved in controversies such as the 'MechaHitler' incident and nonconsensual sexual imagery scandals. Musk told employees that in about 'four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value' of the company, but achieving that will require more AI revenue. AI-assisted coding has emerged as a clear monetization path, with Anthropic’s growth fueled by Claude Code. Bringing Cursor into the fold was part of that strategy, and the companies were already working together before the acquisition closed. This month, Cursor and SpaceX jointly released Grok 4.6, a new model that scores higher on benchmarks for coding and complex multi-step agentic tasks. Adding Cognition and its coding agent Devin, along with an enterprise customer base that includes Mercedes-Benz, Citi, and Goldman Sachs, would have given SpaceX another way to deepen its push into AI coding and compete for enterprise customers. Bloomberg reports that the deal talks are no longer active, but that the companies are still discussing working together — potentially with Cognition using SpaceX’s computing capacity, which the company is selling to other AI players like Anthropic until it needs that capacity for itself. Wu did not address this specific claim in his denial. Cognition remains one of the largest independent AI software coding startups that hasn’t yet been acquired by a major AI model maker. The company raised a $1 billion round at a $25 billion post-money valuation in late May and is now in early talks for a new round of funding at a $40 billion valuation. Cognition made headlines last year when it acquired the remaining assets of competitor Windsurf after Google DeepMind acqui-hired the startup’s CEO and top research in a $2.4 billion deal for talent and licensing rights. After the merger, Cognition laid off 30 employees and offered buyouts to the remaining 200 Windsurf employees. Those who stayed faced strict operational expectations, like an 80+ hour workweek and six days in the office. That sort of wartime work ethic wouldn’t be out of place in a Musk company. Musk has said he 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.
Source: techcrunch
