Elon Musk announced on Sunday, June 28, 2026, that SpaceX has reassigned a few dozen top engineers from its Starlink and Starship programs to help develop the Grok artificial intelligence model. The move follows the merger of Musk’s AI startup, xAI, into SpaceX in February 2026 and the company’s agreement this month to acquire the AI coding platform Cursor. Musk stated that the increased engineering support is intended to accelerate the release of new models trained from scratch.
The reorganization follows a series of changes at xAI earlier in 2026. The startup, which Musk founded in 2023, underwent a reorganization that resulted in the departure of the last of its 11 original co-founders. Musk previously noted in March 2026 that the Grok model was being rebuilt to address performance gaps compared to competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic, specifically regarding coding capabilities.
According to Musk, the latest version of the chatbot, Grok 4.5, is currently in private beta testing at Tesla and SpaceX. The development team now includes staff from Cursor, which SpaceX agreed to acquire for $60 billion in June 2026. This acquisition followed SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO), which valued the company at $85 billion. As part of the arrangement, SpaceX granted Cursor access to its supercomputers to assist in training the Grok models.
This shift in personnel affects "a few dozen" of the top Starlink and Starship engineers at SpaceX, who are now shifting much of their time to AI. In June 2026, SpaceX reported to investors that it views the total addressable market for its services as $28.5 trillion, with AI representing $26.5 trillion of that value.
Musk stated that SpaceX intends to release new AI models every month for the remainder of 2026. Employees at Tesla and SpaceX are the first to see these changes through the private beta of Grok 4.5. The integration of Cursor's training data into Grok is intended to improve the tool's coding accuracy.
The long-term strategy involves using revenue from the company's $85 billion IPO to construct up to one million orbital data centers. These centers, built with Starlink technology and launched via Starship rockets, are designed to host and train future AI models in space. The next milestones for this project include the monthly release schedule for new models and the continued integration of Cursor staff into SpaceX operations. The specific dates for the deployment of the orbital data centers were not reported.