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Industry 2026-08-20

Five days after paying $60 billion for one coding startup, the rocket company went after the other. Its chief executive says no such thing happened.

Five days after paying $60 billion for one coding startup, the rocket company went after the other. Its chief executive says no such thing happened.

Bloomberg reported on 19 August that SpaceX approached Cognition, the company behind the Devin coding agent, about buying it — which would have been its second large AI acquisition inside a week, after the $60 billion purchase of Anysphere, maker of Cursor, closed on 14 August. According to the report the approach went nowhere and the deal talks are no longer active, but the two companies are still discussing working together, possibly with Cognition using SpaceX's computing capacity. Cognition's chief executive Scott Wu contradicted the account publicly on X the same day, saying the company is not for sale and that the two have not been in talks. He did not address the compute discussions. The financial backdrop is not disputed: Cognition raised $1 billion in late May at a $25 billion post-money valuation, and Bloomberg reports it is now in early talks at $40 billion. Devin's enterprise customers include Mercedes-Benz and GE Aerospace. SpaceX absorbed xAI in May, so Cursor and Grok already sit inside the same group.

Why it mattersTwo things are worth separating here. The first is the denial: a named chief executive publicly contradicting a Bloomberg story is unusual and should carry weight, though 'we are not for sale' and 'nobody ever approached us' are different claims, and companies routinely make the first while the second is doing quiet work. The second is the pattern that survives either version of events. A rocket company with no history in developer tools now owns the most widely used AI code editor, has an appetite for more, and holds something the coding startups increasingly cannot buy at any price, which is compute. Whether Cognition sells or merely rents, the direction of travel is the same: the tools that write software are being pulled into the orbit of whoever owns the chips and the electricity.
#Coding#AI Agents

✓ Verified · 4 sources

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