Elon Musk says SpaceX is putting top Starship and Starlink engineers to work on Grok

Elon Musk said SpaceX has deployed dozens of top Starlink and Starship engineers to overhaul its Grok AI model, as the company accelerates its AI efforts following its recent IPO and acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor. The move signals SpaceX's aggressive push to catch up with rivals OpenAI and Anthropic in the AI race.

It's all hands on deck at SpaceX as the company plays catch-up in the AI race https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ai-talent-wars-anthropic-jumper-shazeer-karpathy-openai-2026-6 . Elon Musk said on Sunday that SpaceX had deployed "a few dozen" top Starlink and Starship engineers to help overhaul its Grok model https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-xai-leadership-style-big-year-grok-ipo-spacex-2026-2 . "The SpaceXAI cadence of model and harness improvement is speeding up tremendously, particularly due to a few dozen of the top Starlink/Starship engineers shifting much of their time to AI," wrote Musk in a post on X. The billionaire added https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2071357162195132454 that engineers from Cursor, the AI coding startup that SpaceX agreed this month to buy for $60 billion https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-confirms-cursor-acquisition-60-billion-ai-coding-startup-2026-6 , were also working on the new foundation model, which was partly trained on Cursor training data. Musk said that Grok 4.5, the latest version of the chatbot, was now in private beta https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2071184354756477041 at Tesla and SpaceX, and posted that SpaceX would release new models "trained from scratch" every month this year. Musk's efforts to take the lead in the AI race have faced roadblocks in the past few months. The Tesla CEO overhauled xAI, the AI startup he founded in 2023 to take on OpenAI and Google, earlier this year in a sweeping reorganization that saw the last of the company's 11 cofounders https://www.businessinsider.com/xai-cofounder-ross-nordeen-leaves-musk-preps-spacex-ipo-2026-3 depart. XAI's Grok has lagged rival AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, especially on coding, and Musk wrote in March https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-xai-missed-good-talent-startup-interview-cofounder-exodus-2026-3 that xAI was "being rebuilt from the foundations up." In February, Musk merged xAI with SpaceX, and the deal to acquire Cursor was confirmed shortly after the rocket company's record-breaking $85 billion IPO https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-stock-market-cap-400-billion-post-ipo-hangover-2026-6 earlier this month. The deal cemented the meteoric rise of Cursor, an AI coding startup led by 25-year-old Michael Truell https://www.businessinsider.com/cursor-ceo-michael-truell-spacex-elon-musk-anthropic-2026-6 , and saw SpaceX grant Cursor access to the company's supercomputers in return for help training Grok. Deploying top Starlink and Starship engineers to overhaul Grok is the latest sign that SpaceX is going all in on AI. Musk has said the company will use the windfall from its mega-IPO to build a network of up to a million orbital data centers https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-ipo-wild-bet-physical-future-ai-orbital-data-centers-2026-5 , built on Starlink technology and carried into space by Starship, that will train and run increasingly advanced AI models. In its investor materials presented before the IPO, SpaceX estimated its total addressable market was worth $28.5 trillion https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-ipo-filing-going-public-investors , of which AI accounts for $26.5 trillion.