이미지: Gizmodo
Summary
- Musk told Cursor employees at an all-hands that Grok isn't leading the market and named Anthropic as the company to catch up to
- SpaceX closed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor on August 15, following an April partnership and a June acquisition announcement
- Cursor moved to a shared SpaceX-AI Slack starting August 19, and 45 employees have left the company since April
- 인수 금액
- 약 600억달러(약 83조원)
- 인수 완료일
- 2026년 8월 15일
- 보도
- The Information, 통화 참석 익명 소식통 5명 인용
- 커서 연환산 매출
- 2026년 6월 기준 약 40억달러
- 퇴사자 수
- 4월 이후 45명
Elon Musk told employees at Cursor — now his coding tool company — that he's "not used to losing." But in the same breath, he acknowledged that Grok, the AI chatbot he built, isn't leading the market. He reportedly singled out Anthropic by name as the company Grok needs to catch up to.
The remarks were reported by The Information, citing five anonymous sources who were on the call. Musk reportedly told staff at the AI coding editor that Grok is in a position where it desperately needs to catch up, and he called out Anthropic specifically as the benchmark Cursor employees should aim to surpass. Bloomberg had previously reported separately that even xAI's own staff frequently used Anthropic's Claude over Grok for their work.
The comments came just after SpaceX finalized its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor. SpaceX first signed a partnership with an acquisition option back in April, announced plans to buy the company outright in June, and made the final acquisition official on August 15. According to the domestic outlet AI Times, the all-hands was held over video and drew roughly 1,000 Cursor employees. Cursor is an AI editor built for developers, letting users choose between Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT, or Google's Gemini directly inside the interface — while also training its own model, called Composer, in-house. That dual position, borrowing other companies' models while building its own, is part of why its next moves under new ownership are drawing so much attention.
Musk reportedly told the room that AI models carry a risk of becoming uncontrollable, and that's exactly why SpaceX needs to secure the technology before anyone else does. Back in March, xAI had already said Grok "wasn't built right from the start" and that it was rebuilding from the ground up — so this latest comment reads as more of the same self-critical thread.
Integration work is already moving fast. Cursor staff moved onto a shared SpaceX-AI Slack starting August 19, and employees were reportedly encouraged to visit SpaceX's Silicon Valley headquarters and read "Liftoff," a book about SpaceX's early days. Since April, 45 employees have left Cursor, and those who stayed through the close of the deal reportedly celebrated by posting rocket emojis in Slack. Cursor's annualized revenue was around $4 billion as of this past June.
The episode shows SpaceX expanding its footprint in the coding AI market even as it grapples with real competitiveness problems at Grok. Around the same time, there were reports of Grok Lite spitting out incoherent answers over several days. How much the engineering talent and infrastructure gained from the Cursor deal actually closes that gap will likely become clearer over the coming months, through whatever follow-up models emerge and how well Grok gets integrated into Cursor itself.
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