{"id":655102,"date":"2026-08-25T05:49:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T05:49:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/655102\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T05:49:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T05:49:12","slug":"not-used-to-losing-apparent-elon-musk-pep-talk-to-his-cursor-staff-paints-sad-picture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/655102\/","title":{"rendered":"Not \u2018Used to Losing\u2019: Apparent Elon Musk Pep Talk to His Cursor Staff Paints Sad Picture"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can\u2019t say Elon Musk has concealed his motives when it comes to having SpaceX buy Cursor. The purpose is to catch up with AI leaders OpenAI, and, especially, Anthropic. A new report from the Information<\/a> published Monday describes a supposed August meeting in which he spelled this all out, leaving no mystery about how he felt.<\/p>\n

The Information\u2019s report comes from five anonymous insiders, the publication says. This meeting was apparently on or around August 15, when SpaceX closed the deal to buy Cursor for $60 billion<\/a>. Apparently this was Musk\u2019s very first time addressing the staff of Cursor in an all-hands.<\/p>\n

It sounds like Musk did not mince words, telling his newly acquired staffers that they were his way of playing catch-up. The Information summed up his description of his apparent predicament by saying \u201che wasn\u2019t used to losing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The premise of what he was trying to communicate was that Tesla and SpaceX are \u201cdominant\u201d players where they do business, while his AI company, xAI, had \u201cfallen behind,\u201d per the Information.<\/p>\n

And sure, SpaceX and Tesla are dominant in a manner of speaking. For instance Tesla has the highest market cap of any car company<\/a>, but the company doesn\u2019t dominate the roads by any stretch of the imagination. Tesla\u2019s rankings in terms of total sales place it anywhere from 10th<\/a> to 12th<\/a> in the U.S., below Subaru. And if you\u2019re in the market for a rocket launch, it\u2019s true that there\u2019s a good chance you\u2019ll call SpaceX, but not a lot of people are in that market, and right now if you look at SpaceX\u2019s own page of upcoming launches<\/a>, you\u2019ll see that the client is Starlink\u2014in other words SpaceX\u20144 out of 5 times.<\/p>\n

\u201cGrok isn\u2019t the leader in its market, and it desperately needs to catch up, he said,\u201d the Information wrote.<\/p>\n

Musk also supposedly said AI models are sure to become too advanced for humanity to control, so he considers it necessary that SpaceX \u201cbuild the technology before other companies did,\u201d per the Information. This may come across as troubling if you A) agree with Musk about AI becoming impossible to control, but B) don\u2019t trust Musk and only Musk to be the one to control it, like he apparently does.<\/p>\n

This report says Cursor shifted over to the SpaceXAI Slack starting last Monday. Cursor staff members are apparently being urged to visit SpaceX\u2019s corporate HQ in Silicon Valley, and to read the book Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Grok, Elon Musk\u2019s flagship AI model, was in bad shape\u2014even if you set aside the \u201cMechaHitler<\/a>\u201d and non-consensual deepfake<\/a> stuff. In March, Musk admitted as much, writing<\/a> that Grok\u2019s parent company, xAI \u201cwas not built right first time around,\u201d and was \u201cbeing rebuilt from the foundations up.\u201d Perhaps the clearest internal evidence that something was deeply wrong with Grok was that, according to Bloomberg<\/a>, not even xAI staffers who liked to vibe code used it. They frequently used Claude, Bloomberg wrote. Musk apparently praised Claude\u2019s parent company Anthropic at his August Cursor pep talk.<\/p>\n

\u201cRebuilding\u201d xAI would apparently require the help of a company with credibility in the AI coding space, and in April, SpaceX announced a partnership<\/a> with Cursor that included an option to buy it. Then in June came the announcement that SpaceX would in fact buy it. The Information\u2019s report claims that Cursor employees \u201ccelebrated the news with rocket-ship emojis on Slack.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Cursor has reportedly been on a hiring spree, and total headcount has grown in recent days, the Information says 45 Cursor staffers have departed since April.<\/p>\n

Gizmodo reached out to SpaceX for comment. We will update if we hear back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You can\u2019t say Elon Musk has concealed his motives when it comes to having SpaceX buy Cursor. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655103,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,93662,18,1647,5066,19,17,2731,82,11380],"class_list":["post-655102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-cursor","tag-eire","tag-elon-musk","tag-grok","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-spacex","tag-technology","tag-xai"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117154582625655261","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}