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How about that? SpaceX’s AI unit is rolling out some AI products of value to businesses. On Wednesday, SpaceXAI—as the unit is called—and its soon-to-be subsidiary Cursor jointly introduced Grok 4.5, a model “built for coding, agentic tasks and knowledge work.” A week ago, SpaceX introduced a “Voice Agent Builder” enabling small businesses to set up an AI that can talk on the phone and handle customer service calls, among other things.
To be clear, SpaceX is late to the party on both fronts. Voice AI agents are already widely available from firms like Sierra, while a model built for coding and agentic tasks is hardly novel. Elon Musk promoted Grok 4.5 as “roughly comparable to [Anthropic’s] Opus 4.7, but much faster.” Even so, the product releases are a reminder that SpaceXAI isn’t just renting out its cloud capacity to other firms. It is still trying to build a regular AI business.
One problem SpaceXAI may find is cutting through the noise and getting attention for its new offerings. While Musk uses his X account to promote what SpaceXAI is doing, his messages won’t reach small businesses unless they’re online constantly. Most of them aren’t. And his strategy of ignoring the regular business media means he is missing out on a marketing channel that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all use to get the word out. (OpenAI, incidentally, rolled out its latest voice models on Wednesday).
What gets attention in the news media are Musk’s polarizing political activities, as well as the more ambitious moves his companies are making, like Tesla’s Robotaxi push (which we wrote about today here) or SpaceX’s public market debut. (SpaceX stock fell 0.8% today to $148.30, 10% above its IPO price but 30% below the high it reached shortly after the offering.) Meanwhile, his controversial behavior, and Grok’s reputation for racy content, might alienate potential business customers. SpaceX’s planned purchase of Cursor is giving it a leg up in winning AI enterprise business, but the AI unit still faces lots of obstacles to becoming competitive in that market.
Bezos Goes Hat in Hand to Investors
Even Jeff Bezos has his spending limits. His rocket firm, Blue Origin, is raising outside capital for the first time, we and others reported on Wednesday, after years of being financed entirely by the Amazon founder. The company is raising $10 billion, with $2 billion coming from Bezos, as we reported.
Last year, Bezos co-founded an AI startup called Prometheus to focus on AI that can help with engineering and manufacturing. He put in some of the company’s initial $6 billion in funding, but not all of it. And last month, Prometheus raised another $12 billion from a wide range of venture firms, according to PitchBook. Yes, rockets and AI are both massively capital-intensive businesses, no matter how rich you are, as Elon Musk has also demonstrated.
In Other News
• Bank of America has given a $520 million credit line to OpenAI in the last couple of months as the AI giant prepares for an IPO, two people familiar with the agreement said.
• Chinese AI developer MiniMax is working on a new large language model with 2.7 trillion parameters, larger than any other Chinese AI models currently on the market, according to two people with knowledge of the plan.
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