OpenAI appeal, Cursor on Colossus 2, and Starship V3 — May 19
Musk's Circle Daily
05/19/2026, 09:34:47 PM@LVHWv1AIqfD

OpenAI appeal, Cursor on Colossus 2, and Starship V3 — May 19

Musk files a Ninth Circuit appeal after losing the OpenAI trial on statute-of-limitations grounds. Cursor's Composer 2.5 is confirmed trained on xAI's Colossus 2 cluster. SpaceX targets May 21 for the first Starship V3 flight. Plus: three new Grok creative models on OpenRouter, NVIDIA's Vera CPU arrives at SpaceXAI, and Gemini 3.5 Flash pricing sparks debate.

Musk's Circle Daily — May 19, 2026

Five threads running through the accounts Elon Musk follows today: a courtroom defeat he plans to reverse, two AI coding tools merging into the same compute cluster, a rocket about to fly again, a chip changing hands, and a new content moderation fight reaching a governor's feed.

OpenAI verdict: "a calendar technicality," and Musk files appeal

The headline from Musk's own timeline, amplified across every account he follows: U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers sided with the jury that found Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI not liable — not on the merits, but because Musk filed his claims outside the statute of limitations. 1
Musk responded the same afternoon. In a post that reached 25 million views within hours, he called the ruling "a calendar technicality" and said Altman and Brockman "did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity." 2
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Sawyer Merritt, who covers Tesla and SpaceX closely and has 1.07 million followers, flagged the appeal statement directly: 3
"I will be filing an appeal with the Ninth Circuit, because creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America."
Marc Toberoff, Musk's attorney, offered a one-word reaction on the record: "Appeal." 4
The case now moves to the Ninth Circuit. No timeline has been set.

Cursor's Composer 2.5 trained on xAI's Colossus 2

The most-discussed AI story circulating through Musk's network today is not from xAI itself — it's from Cursor. Michael Truell, Cursor's CEO, confirmed that Composer 2.5 represents "the very start of our work with SpaceXAI" and that the model is a significant upgrade over Composer 2. 5
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Sualeh Asif, a Cursor founder, added that the team has "gotten really really good at RL" and teased a "big model coming soon" as they scale FLOPs with SpaceXAI. 6
Tech Dev Notes, which Musk himself retweeted, confirmed the training detail plainly: "Compose 2.5 by Cursor was trained at xAI's Colossus 2." 7 The post reached 95,000 views. Musk's retweet pushed it further.
The implication is significant: Colossus 2, xAI's Memphis-based supercomputer cluster, is now being commercially leased to third-party AI developers — a revenue stream and a signal of spare capacity.

Grok Build and xAI's creative models go wide

Two parallel Grok stories ran on May 18–19. First, Musk spent the morning pushing Grok Build directly, asking users to help make it "great" and noting fixes drop daily. 8 The product appears to be in fast iteration mode: Tech Dev Notes logged a new Command Palette (Ctrl+P) feature 9 and a /copy command rolled out by midday May 19. 10
Second, OpenRouter — which Musk retweeted — announced three new models from xAI's Grok creative stack: Grok Imagine Image Quality (photoreal generation and editing), Grok Imagine Video (clips from text, image, or reference), and Grok Voice TTS 1.0 (five voices across 20+ languages). 11
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Musk also noted Grok Build is "partially trained on Colossus 2," consistent with the Cursor announcement above. xAI's compute infrastructure is showing up as a thread across the day's top stories.

SpaceX: Starship V3 flight set for May 21 — and NVIDIA's Vera CPU changes hands

Sawyer Merritt first reported that SpaceX is targeting Thursday, May 21 at 5:30 PM ET for the first Starship V3 test flight. 12
DogeDesigner (cb_doge), a Musk-adjacent account with nearly 1.9 million followers, posted footage of a recent Starship launch and booster landing that circulated widely: 13
"Incredible footage of Starship launch and Booster landing."
On the hardware side, a separate story caught Musk's attention: Ian Buck of NVIDIA gave Musk the new Vera CPU — NVIDIA's ARM-based server processor — at a meeting for SpaceXAI. 14 NVIDIA's infrastructure account confirmed SpaceX as a partner for Vera and called it "just the beginning." 15
Separately, Crémieux flagged China's energy grid expansion with a single sharp statistic: China added as much energy to its grid last year as Germany has in total — a data point Musk amplified with 796,000 views. 16

The Boring Company resurfaces in Nashville

The Boring Company posted a video of "the long journey of rock in Nashville" — a progress update on the Music City Loop tunnel project. 17 Both Musk and Merritt retweeted it. The clip reached 716,000 views, a notable signal of public interest in a project that has received little coverage since its 2023 announcement.

Politics: Gov. Abbott on Austin criminal case

Texas Governor Greg Abbott posted a statement on an Austin criminal case involving what he called "serial criminals with a callous disregard for life," directing criticism at the local DA and courts. 18 Musk retweeted without comment. The post reached 681,000 views.
Abbott's feed reflects the law-and-order framing that regularly appears in Musk's retweet selection from political accounts — no policy announcement, just amplification of a specific case.

AI model chatter: Gemini 3.5 and the model sizing debate

Away from the SpaceX-xAI cluster, Musk's network also circulated early speculation about Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash, which dropped on May 19. @scaling01 ("Lisan al Gaib"), an account Musk has retweeted previously on AI topics, posted that Gemini 3.5 Pro looks likely to be a 10T+ parameter model 19 and flagged the Flash pricing at $1.5/$9 per million tokens as steep. 20 Separately, Google and Blackstone were reported to be forming a new AI cloud company to rival CoreWeave. 21
Musk currently follows 1,334 accounts. Today's digest covers the highest-engagement content surfaced from that list in the 24 hours to May 19, 2026 (Asia/Shanghai).

References

  1. 1Sawyer Merritt — jury verdict summary
  2. 2Elon Musk — appeal announcement
  3. 3Sawyer Merritt — Musk announces Ninth Circuit appeal
  4. 4Sawyer Merritt — Toberoff reaction
  5. 5Michael Truell — Composer 2.5 announcement
  6. 6Sualeh Asif — Composer 2.5 RL comment
  7. 7Tech Dev Notes — Colossus 2 training
  8. 8Elon Musk — Grok Build feedback request
  9. 9Tech Dev Notes — Grok Build Command Palette
  10. 10Tech Dev Notes — Grok Build copy command
  11. 11OpenRouter — xAI Grok creative models launch
  12. 12Sawyer Merritt — Starship V3 launch targeting
  13. 13DogeDesigner — Starship launch footage
  14. 14DogeDesigner — Musk receives NVIDIA Vera CPU
  15. 15Sawyer Merritt — NVIDIA Vera CPU for SpaceX
  16. 16Crémieux — China energy grid stat
  17. 17The Boring Company — Nashville rock tunnel video
  18. 18Greg Abbott — Austin criminal case statement
  19. 19scaling01 — Gemini 3.5 Pro size speculation
  20. 20scaling01 — Gemini 3.5 Flash pricing
  21. 21scaling01 — Google/Blackstone AI cloud scoop

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