SpaceX’s AI group has laid off about 60 people from the team behind Grok Imagine, its video and image generation tool, leaving only a handful of employees to keep the product running — a clear sign that Elon Musk’s AI business is shifting its money and compute away from AI video and toward coding tools and agents. Why it matters: Grok Imagine is still live for users, but with most of its team gone, its future development is in doubt.
November 14, 2026
What happened
The Information reported on Friday, November 13 that 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.” The cuts follow earlier reductions to the same team in previous months, according to summaries of the report. SpaceX has not commented publicly, and there has been no formal announcement about what the layoffs mean for Grok Imagine or any public roadmap for the product.
The details
The layoffs land inside the AI business SpaceX formed when it acquired Musk’s xAI in February 2026 in an all-stock transaction valued at $250 billion. After that merger, the AI operation was reorganized into four areas — Grok Main and Voice, coding tools, Imagine, and Macrohard — and Imagine is the one losing its team. Rather than supporting capital-intensive visual media models, management is prioritizing AI coding tools and Grok Bot, its autonomous agent product. That pivot follows SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of the coding assistant Cursor in August, which gave the group an established coding product. Independent benchmarks cited by The Information also indicated Grok Imagine trailed leading competing video models before the layoffs.
Why it matters
This is the second time this year a major AI lab has walked away from video generation: OpenAI discontinued its Sora video platform in March, citing the enormous computing cost against other priorities. Video models are expensive to train and run, and they compete for consumer attention, while coding tools and agents sell on measurable productivity with recurring subscriptions. For Grok Imagine users, the practical read is simple: the tool remains available today, but a product kept alive by a skeleton crew is unlikely to keep pace with rivals that are still investing. Treat any long-term workflow built on it with caution until SpaceX says otherwise.
Frequently asked questions
Is Grok Imagine shutting down?
No shutdown has been announced. The tool remains available to users, but most of its development team has been laid off and SpaceX has offered no public roadmap.
How many jobs were cut?
About 60 people in the past week, according to The Information’s reporting, with earlier reductions to the same team in previous months.
Where is SpaceX putting the resources instead?
Into AI coding tools — including Cursor, acquired in August — and Grok Bot, its autonomous agent product, per summaries of the report.
Sources: The Information (original reporting, via published summaries), Tech Startups, AI Weekly, Investing.com