Bloomberg dropped a bombshell Wednesday: SpaceX reportedly made a run at Cognition, the AI coding startup behind Devin, as part of Musk’s scramble to close the gap with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Cognition CEO Scott Wu wasted no time pushing back, calling the story inaccurate on X and insisting the company “is not for sale” — though notably, he didn’t address every detail in the report.
The timing makes sense. SpaceX just swallowed Cursor in a $60 billion deal that closed last week, and the two companies already shipped Grok 4.6 together this month. Adding Cognition would have brought Devin plus an enterprise roster featuring Mercedes-Benz, Citi, and Goldman Sachs — exactly the kind of logos Musk needs to convince corporate buyers that Grok isn’t just a controversy machine. Between last year’s “MechaHitler” incident and this year’s nonconsensual sexual imagery scandals, enterprise trust remains a stubborn problem.
Musk told employees last week that AI will represent “99% of the value” of SpaceX within four or five years. That’s a staggering claim for a company whose core business is rockets, and it explains the acquisition appetite. AI-assisted coding has become the clearest monetization path in the industry — Anthropic’s Claude Code-fueled growth is the reference case — so buying coding startups is less about technology and more about owning distribution to developers.
Cognition itself isn’t standing still. The company raised $1 billion at a $25 billion post-money valuation in late May and is reportedly in early talks for a new round at $40 billion. Bloomberg says the acquisition talks are dead but the companies are still discussing a compute deal, with Cognition potentially renting SpaceX’s capacity. That’s the part Wu didn’t deny. For a startup that absorbed Windsurf’s assets last year and imposed an 80-hour workweek on remaining staff, a Musk partnership wouldn’t be a cultural stretch. The question is whether renting compute eventually becomes a backdoor to something more. In this market, independence is expensive — and getting harder to defend.
