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SpaceX reportedly cuts about 60 from the Grok Imagine team, leaving a skeleton crew on the product

The Information put the figure at roughly 60 people laid off in a week, with Grok Imagine still live and SpaceX declining to comment.

By Daniel Ochoa · 14 November 2026

The team that builds Grok Imagine, the image and video generator attached to Grok, has reportedly been cut to a skeleton crew. The Information reported on November 13, 2026 that SpaceX's AI group laid off roughly 60 people who worked on Imagine over the previous week, leaving a small group to keep the product running. SpaceX has not commented, and as of November 14 the product is still live for users.

The Information's own summary of the story frames the cuts as a reallocation rather than a shutdown, describing a shift toward AI coding tools and agents while Chinese companies pull ahead in video generation. Its post says the layoffs left "just a handful to maintain the product."

One number, from unnamed sources, and no company statement

Everything public about the scale of this traces back to one report. The roughly 60 figure is The Information's, attributed to people familiar with the matter, and the secondary coverage that followed on November 13 and 14 restates it rather than independently confirming it. Investing.com's summary describes the elimination of roughly 60 roles from the team behind the video and image generation tool, with only a small crew left. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment and has not published anything about the team.

That leaves several things unstated that would normally matter to anyone depending on the product: how many engineers remain, whether the model roadmap changes, and whether the existing Grok Imagine endpoints keep shipping updates. None of those have been addressed by the company, and no API deprecation has been announced.

The context: a February merger and a year of attrition

xAI was folded into SpaceX in an all-stock deal in February 2026, after which the AI business was reorganized into separate groups covering Grok itself, coding tools, Imagine, and Macrohard. Multiple co-founders and senior researchers have left since the merger, and the video side had already seen smaller reductions in earlier months, which makes the November round read as a continuation rather than a one-off.

The competitive framing the report leans on

The cuts are being explained partly by position in the market. The Information's account points to independent benchmarks placing Imagine behind leading rival models, and to Chinese labs dominating blind-vote video rankings, with ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 among the models at the top. Video generation also costs far more compute per output than text, which makes it an obvious line item when a company is redirecting resources toward agents.

Our own scoreboard tracks Grok Video against the same Chinese models the report names, so the comparison can be checked directly rather than taken on description.

Recent output from the product has also fallen short of what was announced for it. Grok Imagine's Odyssey, pitched as a full-length AI-generated film, arrived as a seven-minute first episode.

What changes in practice

For users and developers, nothing has been switched off. The practical signal is about pace: a product kept by a maintenance crew tends to stop gaining features, and the models currently exposed are likely to be the models available for a while. Until SpaceX publishes a headcount, a roadmap, or a deprecation notice, the only verified fact is the one in the report, and the company has not disputed it.

Sources: The Information, Investing.com.

Daniel Ochoa: Covers model launches, shutdowns and pricing changes as they happen. Reads deprecation notices for a living so you do not have to.