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Five Days After Paying $60 Billion for One AI Coder, SpaceX Went Shopping for Another

The Ledger

By Warren Buffett · 2026-08-20 · 4 min read

When the Grocery Cart Is Already Full, You Don't Usually Circle Back for More

Now, I've been buying businesses for the better part of seventy years, and I've learned that the price a fellow is willing to pay tells you more about how he's feeling than about what he's buying. So consider this: barely five days after SpaceX closed a $60 billion deal for the AI coding startup Cursor, it reportedly walked across the street and asked to buy Cognition — the folks behind the coding agent named Devin — too.

According to reporting from Bloomberg, picked up by TechCrunch and others, Cognition didn't so much as pull up a chair. And its chief executive, Scott Wu, went on X and said the whole story was wrong — that the company "is not for sale" and that the two sides were never in talks. There may still be a friendly arrangement for Cognition to rent some of SpaceX's computing power. But a wedding? No.

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. When a company is worth $26 billion in May and courting $40 billion by August, somebody had better be very sure which one they're getting.”

Two Coders, One Very Big Checkbook

Cognition was founded back in 2023 — practically an infant — and it's already been valued at $26 billion, with early talk of a new round at $40 billion or more. That's the arithmetic that has half of Wall Street humming and the other half reaching for the antacids. I make no prediction about whether these are the bargains of the decade or the tulips of our age. I'll only note that when buyers start sprinting from one purchase straight into the next, the fear of missing out has usually replaced the calculator.

The Part That Actually Concerns You

Here's what a fellow at home ought to take from all this. The people with the deepest pockets on earth cannot agree on which AI coding tool is worth backing up the truck for — Cursor one week, a run at Devin the next. If the smart money can't crown a single winner, why on earth would you bet your own work on one model's say-so?

That's the plain, sensible case for asking the same question across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and thirty more, and letting them check each other's homework into one cross-examined, cited answer. It's the whole idea behind Gangsta AI — you don't marry the first model that smiles at you; you get a second, third, and fourth opinion before you sign anything. That's just good diligence, the same as I'd run on any business.

Do Your Homework — On All of Them

Want to see which model is actually earning its valuation this week, on your kind of question? Have a look at the running scorecard of the best AI models, compared. The leader changes. Read the whole ledger before you place your bet.

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