Cognition CEO denies report that SpaceX tried to acquire the startup

摘要: Elon Musk’s SpaceX attempted to acquire AI coding startup Cognition as it works to catch up to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI race,

Bloomber

正文

Elon Musk’s SpaceX attempted to acquire AI coding startup Cognition as it works to catch up to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI race,

Bloomberg reported Wednesday

, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Cognition CEO Scott Wu disputed the report soon after it published, writing on X that the story was inaccurate and that Cognition “

is not for sale

,” adding that the two companies haven’t been in talks.

The report comes a few days after SpaceX’s

$60 billion acquisition

of Cursor, another AI coding startup, whose deal

last week.

SpaceX acquired Musk’s AI company, xAI, earlier this year. It then went public in a

blockbuster IPO in

, with its market capitalization rising to nearly $2.3 trillion at its peak.

SpaceX has sold investors on its AI ambitions, which include eventually building

data centers in space

. But the xAI business remains relatively early-stage and has fallen behind competitors.

It’s also had to contend with its chatbot Grok’s penchant for controversy, including last year’s

“MechaHitler”

incident and this year’s

nonconsensual sexual imagery scandals

, as it tries to win over enterprise customers.

Last week,

Musk told SpaceX’s employees

that in about “four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value” of the company, but achieving that feat will require SpaceX to pull in much more revenue from AI.

AI-assisted coding has emerged as one of the clearest ways to monetize the technology. Anthropic’s meteoric growth, fueled in large part by Claude Code, is proof of that. Bringing Cursor into the fold was part of that equation, 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

来源: TechCrunch AI