Bloomberg reported on August 19 that SpaceX attempted to acquire Cognition, citing sources familiar with the matter. Cognition CEO Scott Wu disputed the report within hours, writing on X that the story was inaccurate, that Cognition “is not for sale,” and that the two companies haven’t been in talks.
The timing explains the interest. SpaceX closed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor the week before, after absorbing xAI earlier this year and going public in June at a market capitalization that peaked near $2.3 trillion. Musk has told SpaceX employees that in “four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value” of the company, per TechCrunch’s account, and AI-assisted coding is the clearest revenue line that thesis has produced so far — Cursor and SpaceX jointly released Grok 4.6 this month, tuned for coding and long-running agentic tasks.
Adding Cognition would have brought Devin plus an enterprise base TechCrunch lists as including Mercedes-Benz, Citi, and Goldman Sachs. Instead, per Bloomberg, acquisition talks are no longer active — but the companies are still discussing working together, potentially with Cognition buying SpaceX computing capacity, the way Anthropic already does. Wu’s denial did not address that compute claim.
The number underneath the story
The same Bloomberg report says Cognition is in early talks for a new funding round at a $40 billion valuation — roughly 60% above the $25 billion post-money TechCrunch cites for its $1 billion round in late May. That figure, not the denial, is what traveled: within days the desk’s social monitoring picked up “$40 billion” explainer videos and shorts in English, French, Spanish, Turkish, and Japanese, alongside syndicated versions of the denial story in at least a dozen languages.
For readers keeping score at home: nothing in this story changes what ships. Devin, the CLI, Desktop, and the plugins keep their release cadence regardless of who is reported to be circling — see the Continuity stream for what actually landed this month.
References
- Cognition CEO denies report that SpaceX tried to acquire the startup — Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch, August 19.
- SpaceX attempted to acquire AI coding startup Cognition — Bloomberg, August 19 (original report; valuation-talks claim).
- Scott Wu’s denial — X, August 19.
- SpaceX officially closes its Cursor acquisition — TechCrunch, August 15.
Devin is a trademark of Cognition; other product names belong to their respective owners.