SpaceX Cuts About 60 Grok Imagine Jobs, Keeps a Skeleton Crew

SpaceX's artificial intelligence unit has cut roughly 60 jobs from the team behind Grok Imagine, its text-to-image and video generator, The Information reported on Nov. 13. Only a handful of people remain, retained to keep the tool running. It is still live for users.

SpaceX has not commented. The entire account of the layoffs rests on The Information's reporting, and the outlets that followed — Infobae and BeInCrypto among them — cite that report rather than offering sources of their own. Nothing has been said about whether the video features will be wound down or rebuilt. No roadmap exists.

Why cut the video team?

The report points to a shift in priorities. Leadership now favors AI coding tools and Grok Bot, the agent that performs tasks on its own. Video generation is the expensive cousin here: it needs far more computing power per request than text. When serving costs outrun revenue, the math does the editing.

Independent benchmarks cited by The Information placed Grok Imagine behind the leading rival models. In blind-vote video rankings in July, Chinese companies held the top six spots, led by ByteDance's Seedance 2.0. The competitive gap, in other words, was not narrowing on its own.

Elon Musk had struck a different note in March, writing on X that the next version of Grok Imagine would be "epic" and that the company was doubling down on the category. Nine months later, the team that would have built it is mostly gone. That is a verdict, not a roadmap change.

What is SpaceXSI?

The AI business reached SpaceX through an all-stock deal in February, when the company absorbed xAI. It now operates inside SpaceX as SpaceX Super Intelligence, or SpaceXSI. The unit's work was split into four areas:

• The main Grok chatbot and voice
• Coding
• Imagine, the image and video generator
• A project called Macrohard

The video team had already been trimmed in earlier months, so the latest round lands on wounded ground. In May, The Information reported that more than 50 researchers and engineers had left the unit since the merger.

A pattern of strain, not a single cut

The layoffs fit a broader pattern of cost pressure inside the AI group. Earlier this month, the unit trimmed usage quotas for Grok Bot after Musk said serving costs had outrun revenue. On Nov. 10, a security firm found 35,000 apps built with Grok Build exposed to anyone who cared to look.

Each item is small on its own. Together they sketch an operation absorbing an ambitious media-model effort while watching its compute budget and its security posture at the same time.

What happens to Grok Imagine now?

For now, nothing visible. The image and video features remain available, maintained by the small group that survived the cuts. SpaceX has announced no plans for the product's future, and the company's silence leaves two readings open: quiet maintenance until a cheaper architecture arrives, or a slow fade toward the coding and agent work that leadership actually wants to fund.

The signals — compute costs, benchmark position, quota trims and now a gutted team — all point in one direction. Video generation at SpaceXSI is, at minimum, no longer the priority it was in March.