Musk pulls top SpaceX engineers from Starship and Starlink to work on Grok AI

Elon Musk is redirecting dozens of SpaceX’s most experienced engineers — pulled directly from the Starship and Starlink programs — to work on Grok, his company’s flagship artificial intelligence model.

Musk revealed the move in a post on X Sunday, writing that SpaceX’s AI team has “significantly accelerated” its model iteration and compute infrastructure work because dozens of top Starlink and Starship engineers have shifted the majority of their working hours to AI development.

The timing is no coincidence. Earlier this month, SpaceX closed its acquisition of Cursor, an AI coding startup, for $60 billion — a deal that came just weeks after the company completed the largest initial public offering in history, raising $85 billion. Engineers from Cursor are now contributing to the new foundational model Grok is being built on, with some of the training data sourced from Cursor’s own codebases.

The latest version, Grok 4.5, is already being tested internally at both Tesla and SpaceX, according to Musk. He also claimed SpaceX plans to release a completely new model — trained from scratch — every month starting this year.

The aggressive push comes as Musk’s AI ambitions have hit repeated roadblocks. Earlier this year, the billionaire restructured xAI, the company he founded in 2023 to compete with OpenAI and Google. The restructuring saw the departure of the last remaining co-founder. Grok has consistently lagged behind rivals from OpenAI and Anthropic, with particularly weak coding performance. Musk acknowledged in March that xAI was undergoing a “complete bottom-up rebuild.”

In February, Musk merged xAI into SpaceX. The Cursor acquisition was finalized shortly after this month’s record-breaking IPO.

The deal was a breakout moment for Cursor, an AI coding startup run by 25-year-old founder Michael Truell. In exchange for acquiring the company, SpaceX opened access to its supercomputing resources to help train Grok.

The decision to pull key engineers from Starlink and Starship is the clearest signal yet that SpaceX is going all-in on AI. Musk has previously said the company plans to use its massive IPO proceeds to build a network of up to a million orbital data centers — infrastructure based on Starlink technology and launched into space by Starship — to train and run increasingly advanced AI models.

SpaceX disclosed to investors before going public that it estimates its total addressable market at $285 trillion, with AI alone accounting for $265 trillion of that figure.