SpaceX cuts about 60 Grok Imagine staff in AI coding pivot

SpaceX laid off about 60 staff from the team developing its Grok Imagine image and video generation AI last week, according to The Information. Only a small number of employees remain to maintain the product, and the service is still being offered to users.

The restructuring is part of a strategy shift toward AI coding tools and agents, with SpaceX promoting its coding tool and agent product Grok Bot as a main business.

Grok Imagine has been a high-volume product. In the first quarter of this year it generated more than 2 billion videos and about 10 billion images per month on average, according to a SpaceX filing with the US SEC.

Its most recent model release, Grok Imagine Video 1.5, arrived in June 2026. It ranked 17th in image-to-video and 16th in text-to-video in Artificial Analysis's video generation model evaluation.

Earlier moves in video and coding

In August 2026, SpaceX completed its acquisition of AI coding company Cursor at a $60 billion valuation. In March 2026, OpenAI shut down its Sora video service, citing high compute costs and a shift in business priorities, and began focusing on enterprise AI and Codex. At the time, Musk said on X that the next Grok Imagine update would be great and that the company was doubling down on the field.

With this reduction, Google and Meta are among the few major US AI companies still focused on developing their own video generation models. ByteDance, Alibaba, Kuaishou and MiniMax are also concentrating on video models, and US startups HeyGen, Utopai and Pika Labs have built new video generation products on MiniMax's open-source H3 model.