SpaceX Officially Acquired Cursor for $60bn, Eyes Cognition Next

Cognition CEO denies report that SpaceX tried to acquire the startup

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 Wedesday, 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 closed last week. SpaceX acquired Musk's AI company, xAI, earlier this year. It then went public in a blockbuster IPO in June, 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 another way to deepen its push into AI coding and compete for enterprise customers. Bloomberg reports that the deal talks are no longer active, but that the companies are still discussing working together -- potentially with Cognition using SpaceX's computing capacity, which the company is selling to other AI players like Anthropic until it needs that capacity for itself. Wu didn't address this specific claim in his denial. Cognition remains one of the largest independent AI software coding startups that hasn't yet been gobbled up by a major AI model maker. The company in late May raised a $1 billion round at a $25 billion post-money valuation, and Bloomberg reports it's now in early talks for new round of funding at a $40 billion valuation. Cognition made headlines last year when it acquired the remaining assets of competitor Windsurf after Google DeepMind acqui-hired the startup's CEO and top research in a $2.4 billion deal for talent and licensing rights. After the merger, Cognition laid off 30 employees and offered buyouts to the remaining 200 Windsurf employees. Those who decided to stay faced strict operational expectations, like an 80+ hour workweek and six days in the office. That sort of wartime work ethic wouldn't be out of place in a Musk company. Musk has said he works up to 120 hours a week and often sleeps on office or factory floors. SpaceX and Cognition did not respond to requests for comment.

SpaceX officially closes its Cursor acquisition

AI coding startup Cursor is now officially a part of SpaceX, according to an announcement on the Cursor blog. Elon Musk's SpaceX -- which also acquired Musk's xAI earlier this year -- announced a deal in April for the companies to develop technology together; the deal also gave SpaceX the option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion. Two months later, as SpaceX became a public company, the companies said they were moving forward with the acquisition. In its announcement that the deal has closed, Cursor repeatedly referenced SpaceX's computing infrastructure, which the company has been renting out to customers including Anthropic and Google. (SpaceX also faces a lawsuit over the pollution created by its data center gas turbines.) Cursor said that by becoming part of SpaceX, it will have "access to the largest fleet of GPUs in the world." "SpaceX is building the computing capacity needed to scale intelligence far beyond what exists today," the company added. "Cursor will be one place where that intelligence becomes useful."

SpaceX has officially acquired AI coding startup Cursor - Engadget

Cursor says it now has the computing power to develop low-cost AI models. Cursor, the startup that became famous for its AI coding tool, is now officially owned by SpaceX. The companies announced the acquisition in June, but the process apparently started in April, when they teamed up for Cursor's model training efforts. In its announcement, Cursor said that it will now have access to "the largest fleet of GPUs in the world," which will give it the computing capacity to build and train better models that it can offer its customers at a lower cost. SpaceX, which merged with Elon Musk's AI company xAI earlier this year, paid $60 billion for the purchase. In July, xAI officially became SpaceXAI. Shortly after the new name was announced, the companies released Grok 4.5, the first model SpaceXAI and Cursor built together. It was designed to "excel at coding, agentic tasks and knowledge work" and to deliver results "at far lower costs." Since then, they have released Grok 4.6, which builds on 4.5. The newer model was trained to do real life tasks like general coding, web development and computer-aided design, among others. Cursor said Grok 4.6 provides an early look at what it can build together with SpaceXAI.

Five days after buying Cursor for $60bn, SpaceX tried to buy Cognition

Five days after completing its $60bn purchase of Cursor, SpaceX approached Cognition, whose chief executive responded in public that the company is not for sale SpaceX approached AI coding startup Cognition about an acquisition, Bloomberg reports, and Cognition did not engage. Chief executive Scott Wu replied publicly that his company is "not for sale and we haven't been talking." SpaceX approached the AI coding company Cognition about buying it, according to Bloomberg, and Cognition did not engage. It would have been the company's second large AI takeover in a matter of months. The denial arrived the same day and went further than the report. Chief executive Scott Wu wrote publicly that Cognition is "not for sale and we haven't been talking." Those two accounts are close but not identical. Bloomberg describes an approach that was not taken up, alongside continuing discussions about working together, including a possible arrangement for Cognition to use SpaceX's computing capacity. Cognition is not cheap either way. It raised $1bn at a $26bn valuation in May and has been in early talks with investors this month at a valuation of at least $40bn. The context is what SpaceX bought last week. It completed a $60bn purchase of Cursor on 14 August, the largest name in the vibe coding market. Buying a second one so quickly says something about the first. SpaceX's AI arm has trailed rivals in selling to businesses and has been through job cuts and restructuring. Cognition would have arrived with customers attached. Its Devin agent is used by Mercedes-Benz and GE Aerospace, and Bloomberg reports that its commercial progress interested SpaceX as much as its technology. Elon Musk has set the pace himself. He told staff that AI revenue would out-earn rockets by September, a target that requires enterprise customers rather than research prestige. The compute talks are the part worth watching. If Cognition ends up renting SpaceX's GPUs, a company that refused to be bought becomes dependent on the infrastructure of the company that tried. Wu has said this before, which matters when reading the denial. He told Bloomberg in May that the round he had just closed was what allowed Cognition to "stay independent and continue as an independent business." For European developers the direction is the story rather than the deal. The tools their engineering teams now depend on are being gathered into an American conglomerate that also launches rockets and runs a satellite network.

SpaceXAI completes its Cursor acquisition following Grok Bot and Grok 4.6 release

When SpaceX isn't landing rockets, it's apparently landing AI company deals. In February, the firm behind Starlink absorbed xAI, which includes Twitter-turned-X. In April, SpaceX inked a deal with Cursor, a competitor to Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. As of August 14, the purchase has been completed. SpaceXAI, as it's now called, also recently released Grok Bot and Grok 4.6 models with the help of Cursor. Update 8/14/2026: SpaceXAI has completed its purchase of Cursor. Update 6/16/2026: SpaceX has acquired Cursor a week after becoming a publicly traded company. Updated original story below: SpaceX struck $10 billion deal with Cursor ahead of $60 billion acquisition Cursor has been popular with software engineers who code with AI on the Mac. It was one of the first services to connect large language model artificial intelligence to the process of building apps. In April, SpaceX and Cursor are "working closely together to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI," the two companies say. The collaboration originally included a $10 billion payment from SpaceX to Cursor: Cursor shared more details about the arrangement in April ahead of today's acquisition: Cursor is partnering with SpaceX to accelerate our model training efforts. We released Composer less than six months ago as our first agentic coding model. After that, Composer 1.5 scaled reinforcement learning by over 20x. Composer 2 then added continued pretraining, reaching frontier-level performance at a fraction of the cost of other models. Each step up in compute has translated to meaningfully more capable models. We've wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we've been bottlenecked by compute. With this partnership, our team will leverage xAI's Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models The SpaceX-Cursor arrangement strengthens a competitor to Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex agentic coding software.

Cognition CEO denies SpaceX acquisition

Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reported on Thursday that SpaceX had explored a deal to acquire Cognition as it looks to strengthen its position in the AI race against OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Cognition CEO Scott Wu has denied a Bloomberg report that Elon Musk's SpaceX had sought to acquire the AI coding startup.Talking to X, Wu said, "This is not true. Huge respect for the SpaceX team but Cognition is not for sale and we haven't been talking."Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reported on Thursday that SpaceX had explored a deal to acquire Cognition as it looks to strengthen its position in the AI race against OpenAI,

SpaceX Closes $60B Cursor Deal -- Why Musk Wanted It - SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX)

SpaceX Closes $60 Billion Cursor Deal: Here's Why This Could Turn Elon Musk's AI Ambitions Into Reality Elon Musk's SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) closed its $60 billion all-stock purchase of Cursor on Friday, sealing a deal it struck just weeks after pulling off the biggest IPO in history. Cursor announced the close on X and said in a blog post that the acquisition gives it access to what it called the world's largest GPU fleet, pointing to this week's Grok 4.6 release as an early sign of what the combination can produce. So why would a rocket and satellite company pay $60 billion for a coding tool? According to analysts, Cursor hands Musk something particularly valuable: a huge base of professional developers, established enterprise distribution and a stream of developer data that may make his AI models better. What Musk Really Bought "Owning the tool that professional developers already trust daily is a faster path to enterprise AI revenue than winning the model race," PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes said. Cursor Is Already Making Grok Better Cursor's users generate vast amounts of data showing how developers interact with codebases and software tools, which SpaceX can use to improve Grok and other AI models. Cursor says Grok 4.5, released in July, was jointly trained with SpaceXAI on trillions of tokens of Cursor data showing how developers interact with codebases and software tools. Prediction market traders aren't yet convinced the Cursor combination will put Musk at the top of AI coding. Nearly $1 million has been traded on a Kalshi market forecasting which company will have the best coding model at the end of 2026, with xAI given a 13% chance, trailing Anthropic at 54% and OpenAI at 30%. What Cursor Gets in Return The deal may also remove Cursor's biggest constraint. The startup wrote in April that it had been bottlenecked by compute, noting that "each step up in compute has translated to meaningfully more capable models." SpaceX said in April that combining Cursor's "leading product and distribution to expert software engineers" with its "million H100 equivalent" Colossus training supercomputer could allow it to build the "world's most useful models." Why Investors Should Care Morgan Stanley reportedly forecasts Cursor's annual recurring revenue run rate could climb from roughly $4 billion in June to $33 billion by 2030. Analyst Adam Jonas wrote that as investors see more "breadcrumbs on the Cursor/Grok story," the implied valuation discount on SpaceX's AI business could lift. The bank has floated a $600 bull case for the stock. For $60 billion, Musk bought customers, distribution and data for Grok, while Cursor got the compute it said it needed when SpaceX first secured its option on the startup in April. Image: Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

SpaceX held talks to acquire AI coding startup Cognition - report By Investing.com

Investing.com -- SpaceX approached artificial intelligence coding startup Cognition AI Inc. about a potential acquisition, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, marking what would have been its second major takeover in recent months as it expands its AI capabilities. The acquisition discussions are no longer active, but both companies remain in talks about potential collaboration, including an arrangement for Cognition to use SpaceX's computing infrastructure, according to the report. Get instant alerts on market-moving headlines with InvestingPro -- now 55% off. Cognition was valued at $26 billion during a May funding round and has entered early discussions with investors for new financing at a valuation of at least $40 billion, Bloomberg News previously reported. Elon Musk's firm has been developing more advanced AI tools to automate tasks, including coding. Musk's AI venture, now called SpaceXAI, has fallen behind competitors in business sales and has implemented multiple rounds of job cuts and organizational changes. AI growth represents a central component of Musk's strategy for SpaceX, which has expanded from a rocket company into a conglomerate encompassing satellite communications and computing operations, boosted by its initial public offering this summer. Founded in 2023, Cognition's primary product is an AI agent named Devin that automates the programming process for engineers. SpaceX's interest in Cognition stemmed from both its technology and business development, the report stated.

Can SpaceX Leap to the AI Frontier? By Investing.com

Investing.com -- SpaceX's acquisition of AI coding platform Cursor could help transform the company from a provider of computing capacity into an integrated artificial intelligence platform, creating substantial upside if execution meets Morgan Stanley's expectations. SpaceX agreed in June to acquire Anysphere, Cursor's parent company, for $60 billion in Class A shares. The transaction is expected to close during the third quarter. Cursor provides an AI-based development environment for writing, debugging and reviewing software. It can route tasks to third-party models or its own Composer model family. The platform is used by more than 50,000 enterprises and 64% of Fortune 500 companies, according to the report. Morgan Stanley estimates Cursor's annual recurring revenue will rise from about $4 billion in June to $8 billion by the end of 2026, $17 billion in 2027 and roughly $33 billion by 2030. Enterprise customers are expected to generate around 75% to 80% of that revenue. The key question is whether Cursor can progress from an interface that accesses other companies' models to a developer of frontier-level models itself. SpaceX could combine Cursor's developer workflow with Grok's intelligence, X's real-time data, SpaceXAI's computing infrastructure and Starlink's connectivity. A partnership with Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) could also create applications in robotics and other forms of physical AI. Morgan Stanley said SpaceX's current valuation gives little credit to this broader platform opportunity. The bank has an Overweight rating and a $300 price target, compared with the $133.11 closing price cited in the report. Its $600 bull case assumes Cursor develops stronger proprietary models and SpaceX captures more value across AI software, computing and deployment. Upcoming catalysts include completion of the acquisition, third-quarter financial disclosures, new Grok model releases and updates on Cursor's recurring revenue. Risks include competition from open-source coding tools, declining model prices, dependence on third-party AI providers and weak margins. Cursor's gross margin is expected to turn positive during 2026 and reach the low-60% range by 2030 as more activity shifts to its proprietary models and SpaceX infrastructure.

SpaceX completes record $60 billion acquisition of AI coding platform Cursor By Investing.com

Investing.com -- SpaceX finalized its acquisition of Anysphere, Inc., the developer of the popular AI coding tool Cursor, in an all-stock transaction valued at $60 billion. Confirmed via an SEC Form 8-K, the historic deal resulted in the issuance of approximately 391 million SpaceX Class A shares and is widely considered the largest startup acquisition on record. Following the announcement, SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) shares saw a 1.5% bump, trading at $143.45. Under the agreement, Cursor's outstanding shares converted into 389.3 million SpaceX shares, with additional restricted stock units and options assumed by the aerospace giant. Cursor will now operate as a wholly owned subsidiary under the newly rebranded "SpaceXAI" division. This integration grants the Cursor team access to SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer, and the combined entity has already launched a beta version of "Grok Bot." Analysts anticipate the Cursor brand will eventually phase out in favor of the Grok moniker. Wall Street remains bullish on the transition; Morgan Stanley maintained a $300 base price target, projecting the Cursor acquisition could drive up to $13 billion in SpaceX revenue by 2027.