Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, is in turmoil behind the scenes.
The company is constantly playing catch-up with rivals Anthropic, with Musk personally obsessed with having his chatbot Grok match Anthropic’s Claude, Bloomberg reports. And its merger with SpaceX, followed by the latter going public in a historic IPO, led to dozens of employees leaving the company, throwing daily operations into chaos.
To get the house in order, Musk promoted Michael Nicolls to lead xAI (which was recently renamed SpaceXAI). But his work was cut out for him. As part of Musk’s plan to rebuild the company, xAI was seeking to slash up to 30 percent of its workforce in March, and that led to employees being fired without anyone informing them, according to Bloomberg.
Its efforts to hire new talent were equally fraught. Promising candidates would get interviewed and not hear back, because the understaffed human resources department couldn’t finish the necessary paperwork, according to the reporting.
