After $60B Cursor Deal, Musk's SpaceX Reportedly Sought Cognition; CEO Says No
新智元 · wechat · 2026-08-20
Bloomberg exclusively reported that SpaceX — fresh from Musk's $60B Cursor acquisition — approached AI coding startup Cognition (maker of Devin) about a potential acquisition. CEO Scott Wu publicly denied it the same day on X: "Cognition is not for sale, and no such negotiations took place." The two sides are, however, still discussing Cognition using SpaceX's Colossus compute (a 220K+ Nvidia GPU cluster that Anthropic also tapped in May).
Scott Wu, a 3-time IOI gold medalist and Codeforces Legendary Grandmaster, co-founded Cognition in 2023. After pivoting from crypto to AI coding, growth has been explosive: a $10B+ round in May 2026 at a $26B valuation, a new round targeting at least $40B, and ARR nearly doubling from $492M to approaching $1B in three months, with clients including Mercedes, Goldman Sachs, NASA and the US military. After absorbing Windsurf's remaining IP and 250-person team in July, Cognition is now the largest independent AI coding company.
The piece argues Cursor is a "copilot" while Devin targets the software engineer role itself — and regardless of who sells, compute upstream remains controlled by Musk, Microsoft and Google.
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