Bloomberg reported on August 19 that SpaceX had tried to buy AI coding startup Cognition, citing unnamed sources. The company’s CEO, Scott Wu, pushed back within hours, posting on X that the story was wrong, that Cognition is not for sale, and that the two companies were not in talks.
The report surfaced days after SpaceX closed its $60B acquisition of Cursor. SpaceX folded Musk’s xAI into its operations earlier this year and went public in June, with a market value that peaked near $2.3T. Musk has told staff that AI will account for 99% of the company’s value within about five years, and coding agents look like one of the fastest ways to turn that ambition into revenue.
Cursor and SpaceX shipped Grok 4.6 together this month. Cognition, which builds the Devin coding agent, was reported earlier in August to be raising at a $40B valuation.
Whether the talks happened or not, the back-and-forth underscores how hard SpaceX is pressing into the coding-agent market.
