AI News · 4 min read
Report: SpaceX cut roughly 60 Grok Imagine jobs
The Information reported on November 13, 2026 that SpaceX laid off roughly 60 people from Grok Imagine. The write-ups say the product is still up.
What The Information reported
On November 13, 2026, The Information published "Elon Musk’s AI Group Guts Grok Video Generation Team," bylined Aaron Tilley, Claudia Chong, and Juro Osawa. The article is paywalled. What follows is what other outlets reported from it, not a SpaceX statement.
The picture above is ours.
Tech Startups ↗ (Daniel Levi, November 13) quotes The Information this way: "Around 60 people who worked on Grok Imagine were laid off in the past week from the SpaceX Super Intelligence group, leaving only a handful of employees to keep the product alive." Tech Startups says the account cites people familiar with the situation. Investing.com ↗ (Luke Juricic, November 13, 09:24) describes the same report as roughly 60 roles cut from the team that develops Grok Imagine, the video and image tool, leaving a small crew to maintain it. Techmeme ↗ headlined the cluster the same day: about 60 Grok Imagine staffers in the past week, a handful left to keep the product alive, with priority shifting to AI coding tools and Grok Bot.
Neither Investing.com nor Tech Startups quotes a comment from SpaceX. Treat the headcount as reported.
What the reports say is still running
Both Investing.com and Tech Startups say Grok Imagine is still available. Tech Startups adds that SpaceX has not announced plans to discontinue it. A handful of people left on a product is a maintenance crew in those stories, not a shutdown notice.
Investing.com's reading of the shift:
| Claim in the secondary reports | Where it appears |
|---|---|
| xAI joined SpaceX in February 2026 | All-stock deal, $250 billion, in both Investing.com and Tech Startups |
| Coding-tool deal in August | Both describe an acquisition of the coding startup Cursor at a $60 billion implied valuation. Tech Startups says it was completed in August |
| What got priority | AI coding tools, and the agent product Grok Bot |
| OpenAI's video tool | Tech Startups says OpenAI discontinued Sora in March 2026. Investing.com says OpenAI dropped Sora earlier this year over compute cost |
| March post attributed to Musk | Investing.com says he posted that the next Grok Imagine release would be "epic" and that the company was "doubling down" |
| Who is left in the US, on Investing.com's account | Google and Meta, as the primary domestic companies still training their own video models |
Investing.com also says independent benchmarks cited by The Information showed Grok Imagine trailing leading models. The write-up does not print the scores, so this piece does not invent any. The same article says The Information pointed at ByteDance, Kuaishou, and MiniMax as the companies still treating video models as a core bet. That is Investing.com's summary of the paywalled story.
Grok Imagine is the image and video product. It is not the text-watermark change on the API, which is a separate November 7 default covered in Grok API text watermarking. Phone calls from the agent product are the November 3 rollout in Grok Bot phone calls. The model line and current prices are in the Grok 4 review.
What people are saying
"What's remarkable is that Elon Musk said they were "doubling down" on Imagine just a few months ago." — Mark Kretschmann (@mark_k) ↗
"A dramatic reversal that raises serious questions about the future of Grok Imagine." — Mark Kretschmann (@mark_k) ↗
"Smart cut. Video burns GPUs and barely pays." — Cronus (@soycronus) ↗
"I give Grok Imagine until July before it's switched off." — Cronus (@soycronus) ↗
Reddit was not reachable for this story.
Mark is reacting to the report, and his "doubling down" line matches the March post Investing.com describes. Cronus's July date is his forecast. No outlet above quotes SpaceX naming a month.
Our take
If you use Grok Imagine today, the product is reported still up. The risk in these stories is the team size, not a posted shutdown. A handful of people keeping a generator alive is a slow-update product. Do not build a pipeline that fails when a new model or a new control never ships. Keep a second generator for work you cannot pause.
Do not schedule around July. That date is one person's guess on X. The sourced facts stop at "past week," "around 60," "a handful," and "still available," all attributed to The Information through the outlets above.
The priority those outlets describe is coding tools and Grok Bot, not a better video model. Grok Bot's phone feature is a separate product with its own limits, in the piece linked above. This report is not a reason to move a video workflow onto the agent, and it is not a review of the agent. A published app on grok.me is a different surface: apps that opened with the link is a security story, not a video-quality story.
Read the headcount as reported. SpaceX has not confirmed it in the stories cited here. If a later statement names a different number, that statement wins.