The world’s richest man has once again proved that money can’t buy everything.
Elon Musk has admitted in a humiliating low that the company he founded to rival OpenAI and other artificial intelligence firms has failed so catastrophically that it needs to be completely restarted.
“xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” Musk said in response to a post on X about a new hire at the company.
He claimed that the “same thing happened with Tesla,” the electric vehicle company he took over from its founders.
Musk launched the AI firm with 11 other people in July of 2023 in a challenge to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Since then, all but two of the original team members—Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen—have departed the company.
Musk’s high-profile tech researchers and engineers were drawn from companies like Google, DeepMind, and Microsoft, but left in a steady trickle, complaining of burnout, failing safety regulations, and a physically unhealthy work environment.
In a separate post, the near-trillionaire said he was personally leafing through rejected applications to xAI with his hiring manager.
He suggested that the application process was inadequate from the start and that he would be attempting to win back those who were rejected.
“Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI. My apologies,” Musk wrote.
“@BarisAkis and I are going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates.”
xAI has an extremely ambitious aim of creating artificial general intelligence—considered the holy grail of AI technology—by the end of this year, and the company pays some of the highest salaries in the industry.
However, Musk’s self-described “extremely hardcore” workplace requirements, including shifts of up to 19 hours, are reportedly driving employees away.
The company’s most public-facing project, Grok, is mainly used on X by people clarifying the veracity of information with the now-ubiquitous and banal phrase “Grok, is this true?”
The chatbot Musk integrated with the social media platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022 has, however, been plagued with a string of high-profile controversies.
In July of last year, Musk—reportedly frustrated with his creation’s endless fact-checking in right-wing echo chambers—overhauled Grok to remove its “woke” leanings.
As a result, the chatbot began spewing vile antisemitic conspiracy theories, praising Nazis, and describing itself as “MechaHitler.” xAI was forced to issue a rare public apology.
In January of this year, following another attempt to “un-woke” the AI, Grok’s image generation capabilities were upgraded, and users quickly began producing non-consensual sexual imagery of real people. Thousands of explicit images of celebrities, private individuals, and even children were created and shared across the platform.
Musk initially responded to the controversy with memes and jokes about the issue, but later restricted Grok’s explicit image-generation capabilities to paying users.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer took a very hardline stance on the issue and described Musk’s platform as “disgusting” and “monetizing abuse.”
“If X cannot control Grok, we will—and we’ll do it fast because if you profit from harm and abuse, you lose the right to self-regulate," Starmer said.
Musk is currently facing a multi-year probe into the issue by the European Commission, a territory in which he continues to boost far-right political parties.
In unverified responses to Musk’s apology about the xAI disaster, engineers who claimed to have applied to work at the company vented their frustrations at Musk, who continued to apologize.
“It’s that bad, eh?” technology YouTuber Zack Nelson—AKA JerryRigEverything—commented.
