---
title: "SpaceX sought to buy AI coding startup Cognition, Bloomberg reports; its CEO says no"
description: "Bloomberg reported Wednesday that SpaceX approached Cognition, the maker of the Devin coding agent, about an acquisition, weeks after closing its $60 billion all-stock purchase of Cursor. Cognition chief executive Scott Wu pushed back publicly, saying the startup 'is not for sale' and that the two companies have not been in talks."
category: "Companies"
category_url: https://boursel.com/category/companies
author: "Rafael Ortiz"
published: 2026-08-19T22:28:00.000Z
updated: 2026-08-19T22:28:00.000Z
canonical: https://boursel.com/article/spacex-sought-to-buy-ai-coding-startup-cognition-bloomberg-reports-its-ceo-says
tags: ["spacex", "cognition", "m-and-a", "artificial-intelligence", "startups"]
---
# SpaceX sought to buy AI coding startup Cognition, Bloomberg reports; its CEO says no

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that SpaceX approached Cognition, the maker of the Devin coding agent, about an acquisition, weeks after closing its $60 billion all-stock purchase of Cursor. Cognition chief executive Scott Wu pushed back publicly, saying the startup 'is not for sale' and that the two companies have not been in talks.

A report and a denial collided on Wednesday over one of the hottest names in AI coding. [Bloomberg reported that SpaceX attempted to acquire Cognition](https://seekingalpha.com/news/4635188-spacex-tried-to-purchase-ai-coding-startup-cognition---bloomberg), the startup behind the autonomous coding agent Devin, as part of Elon Musk's push to compete in the AI race. According to the report, the deal talks are no longer active, though the companies may still discuss working together on computing capacity.

Cognition's chief executive was quick to dispute the story. [Scott Wu wrote on X that the report was inaccurate](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/19/cognition-ceo-denies-report-that-spacex-tried-to-acquire-the-startup/), saying Cognition "is not for sale" and that the two companies have not been in talks. Neither Bloomberg's account nor Wu's denial can be independently confirmed, and the gap between them is the story: either an approach was made and rebuffed quietly, or the market's appetite for AI deal headlines outran the facts.

## Why Cognition is a target

Whatever happened behind the scenes, the interest is easy to explain. [Cognition raised $1 billion in late May at a $25 billion post-money valuation](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/19/cognition-ceo-denies-report-that-spacex-tried-to-acquire-the-startup/), and Bloomberg reports the company is already in early talks to raise again at a valuation around $40 billion, a startling repricing in under three months.

The company's product, Devin, is an AI coding agent, software that goes beyond suggesting lines of code to planning, writing, debugging and shipping it across multi-step tasks. Coding agents have become the most commercially proven category of AI agents, which makes their makers prized acquisition targets for any company assembling an AI stack.

## SpaceX's sudden appetite for AI

The reported approach fits a pattern that has redrawn Musk's corporate empire this year. SpaceX absorbed Musk's AI company xAI earlier in the year, and [last week it closed a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Cursor](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/19/cognition-ceo-denies-report-that-spacex-tried-to-acquire-the-startup/), the AI coding platform, one of the largest startup acquisitions on record. This month, Cursor and SpaceX jointly released Grok 4.6, a model the companies say scores higher on coding benchmarks.

Buying Cognition would have put the two most prominent AI coding products under one roof, an outcome regulators and rivals would have watched closely. Instead, if Bloomberg's reporting holds, the relationship may end up as an infrastructure deal, with Cognition as a customer for SpaceX's growing compute capacity rather than a subsidiary.

## What to watch

For investors, the episode is a read on two things. First, consolidation pressure in AI coding is real: with Cursor now inside SpaceX, every independent player becomes either a target or a holdout. Second, valuations are moving faster than fundraising cycles; a company fielding acquisition interest, denied or not, while doubling its paper value between rounds says more about scarcity of proven AI assets than about any single deal. Cognition's next funding round, and who leads it, will show whether the $40 billion talk was real.

## Sources

- [Cognition CEO denies report that SpaceX tried to acquire the startup](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/19/cognition-ceo-denies-report-that-spacex-tried-to-acquire-the-startup/)
- [SpaceX tried to purchase AI coding startup Cognition - Bloomberg](https://seekingalpha.com/news/4635188-spacex-tried-to-purchase-ai-coding-startup-cognition---bloomberg)