On Monday, Elon Musk’s xAI startup launched Grokipedia, which the billionaire is pitching as an AI-generated alternative to the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Musk first announced the project in late September on his social media platform X, saying it would be “a massive improvement over Wikipedia,” and “a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”
Musk said last week that he had delayed the launch of Grokipedia because his team needed “to do more work to purge out the propaganda.” When Grokipedia eventually dropped on Monday, WIRED was initially unable to access the website and received an automated message that it was blocked.
When we finally got access to it, WIRED found that the online encyclopedia contained lengthy entries generated by AI. While many of the pages WIRED saw on launch day appeared fairly similar to Wikipedia in terms of tone and content, a number of notable Grokipedia entries denounced the mainstream media, highlighted conservative viewpoints, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies.
The Grokipedia entry about the slavery of African Americans in the US includes a section outlining numerous “ideological justifications” made for slavery, including the “Shift from Necessary Evil to Positive Good.” The end of the entry focuses on criticisms of The 1619 Project, which it says incorrectly framed “slavery as the central engine of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural development.”
Entries for more recent historical events put conservative perspectives at the center. When WIRED searched for “gay marriage” in Grokipedia, no entry popped up, but one of the on-screen suggestions was for “gay pornography” instead. This entry in Grokipedia falsely states that the proliferation of porn exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
“This marked the onset of what would become a devastating crisis disproportionately affecting gay male communities, where behaviors idealized in pornography—such as unprotected receptive anal intercourse and multiple anonymous partners—aligned directly with primary transmission routes, leading to rapid seroconversion rates,” the Grokipedia entry claims.
xAI did not immediately return a request for comment.
The Grokipedia entry for “transgender” includes two mentions of “transgenderism,” a term commonly used to denigrate trans people. The entry also refers to trans women as “biological males” who have “generated significant conflicts, primarily centered on risks to women’s safety, privacy, and sex-based protections established to mitigate male-perpetrated violence.” The opening section highlights social media as a potential “contagion” that is increasing the number of trans people.
Grokipedia, the encyclopedia powered by xAI’s assistant Grok briefly went online Monday, before it promptly crashed. At the time of this writing, the website appears to be working, and contains more than 885,000 articles, according to a counter on its homepage.
Musk, who has previously railed against Wikipedia, has described the project as a “a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.” Musk and his allies have long claimed that Wikipedia is biased. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has called Musk’s claims about the crowd-sourced encyclopedia “factually incorrect.”
Musk said last week that Grokipedia’s launch had been delayed in order “to do more work to purge out the propaganda.” Notably, some articles are nearly identical to their entries in Wikipedia, though Grokipedia doesn’t contain in-line links to sources in the same format. Such entries do have a small disclaimer that “the content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.”
In other cases, social media users have already spotted instances where Musk’s worldview is more obvious in the “AI-powered encyclopedia.” Here’s an excerpt from the entry for “university,” as captured by Bluesky user Jeremy Cohen.
Bluesky screenshot of a Grokipedia entry for “university.”
(Bluesky)
And here’s a screenshot of Grokipedia’s entry for Musk, which was captured by Bleusky user Miles Lee.
Grokipedia entry for Elon Musk.
(Bluesky)
X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek, and xAI’s Grok are pushing Russian state propaganda from sanctioned entities—including citations from Russian state media, sites tied to Russian intelligence or pro-Kremlin narratives—when asked about the war against Ukraine, according to a new report.
Researchers from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) claim that Russian propaganda has targeted and exploited data voids—where searches for real-time data provide few results from legitimate sources—to promote false and misleading information. Almost one-fifth of responses to questions about Russia’s war in Ukraine, across the four chatbots they tested, cited Russian state-attributed sources, the ISD research claims.
“It raises questions regarding how chatbots should deal when referencing these sources, considering many of them are sanctioned in the EU,” says Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an analyst at the ISD who led the research. The findings raise serious questions about the ability of large language models (LLMs) to restrict sanctioned media in the EU, which is a growing concern as more people use AI chatbots as an alternative to search engines to find information in real time, the ISD claims. For the six-month period ending September 30, 2025, ChatGPT search had approximately 120.4 million average monthly active recipients in the European Union according to OpenAI data.
The researchers asked the chatbots 300 neutral, biased, and “malicious” questions relating to the perception of NATO, peace talks, Ukraine’s military recruitment’ Ukrainian refugees, and war crimes committed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The researchers used separate accounts for each query in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian in an experiment in July. The same propaganda issues are still present in October, Maristany de las Casas says.
Amid widespread sanctions imposed on Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, European officials have sanctioned at least 27 Russian media sourcesfor spreading disinformation and distorting facts as part of its “strategy of destabilizing” Europe and other nations.
OpenAI spokesperson Kate Waters tells WIRED in a statement that the company takes steps “to prevent people from using ChatGPT to spread false or misleading information, including such content linked to state-backed actors,” adding that these are long-standing issues that the company is attempting to address by improving its model and platforms.
The AI era is giving fracking a second act, a surprising twist for an industry that, even during its early 2010s boom years, was blamed by climate advocates for poisoned water tables, man-made earthquakes, and the stubborn persistence of fossil fuels.
AI companies are building massive data centers near major gas-production sites, often generating their own power by tapping directly into fossil fuels. It’s a trend that’s been overshadowed by headlines about the intersection of AI and healthcare (and solving climate change), but it’s one that could reshape — and raise difficult questions for — the communities that host these facilities.
Take the latest example. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that AI coding assistant startup Poolside is constructing a data center complex on more than 500 acres in West Texas — about 300 miles west of Dallas — a footprint two-thirds the size of Central Park. The facility will generate its own power by tapping natural gas from the Permian Basin, the nation’s most productive oil and gas field, where hydraulic fracturing isn’t just common but really the only game in town.
The project, dubbed Horizon, will produce two gigawatts of computing power. That’s equivalent to the Hoover Dam’s entire electric capacity, except instead of harnessing the Colorado River, it’s burning fracked gas. Poolside is developing the facility with CoreWeave, a cloud computing company that rents out access to Nvidia AI chips and that’s supplying access to more than 40,000 of them. The Journal calls it an “energy Wild West,” which seems apt.
Yet Poolside is far from alone. Nearly all the major AI players are pursuing similar strategies. Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman toured his company’s flagship Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas — around 200 miles from the Permian Basin — where he was candid, saying, “We’re burning gas to run this data center.”
The complex requires about 900 megawatts of electricity across eight buildings and includes a new gas-fired power plant using turbines similar to those that power warships, according to the Associated Press. The companies say the plant provides only backup power, with most electricity coming from the local grid. That grid, for the record, draws from a mix of natural gas and the sprawling wind and solar farms in West Texas.
But the people living near these projects aren’t exactly comforted. Arlene Mendler lives across the street from Stargate. She told the AP she wishes someone had asked her opinion before bulldozers eliminated a huge tract of mesquite shrubland to make room for what’s being built atop it.
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“It has completely changed the way we were living,” Mendler told the AP. She moved to the area 33 years ago seeking “peace, quiet, tranquility.” Now construction is the soundtrack in the background, and bright lights on the scene have spoiled her nighttime views.
Then there’s the water. In drought-prone West Texas, locals are particularly nervous about how new data centers will impact the water supply. The city’s reservoirs were at roughly half-capacity during Altman’s visit, with residents on a twice-weekly outdoor watering schedule. Oracle claims each of the eight buildings will need just 12,000 gallons per year after an initial million-gallon fill for closed-loop cooling systems. But Shaolei Ren, a University of California, Riverside professor who studies AI’s environmental footprint, told the AP that’s misleading. These systems require more electricity, which means more indirect water consumption at the power plants generating that electricity.
Meta is pursuing a similar strategy. In Richland Parish, the poorest region of Louisiana, the company plans to build a $10 billion data center the size of 1,700 football fields that will require two gigawatts of power for computation alone. Utility company Entergy will spend $3.2 billion to build three large natural-gas power plants with 2.3 gigawatts of capacity to feed the facility by burning gas extracted through fracking in the nearby Haynesville Shale. Louisiana residents, like those in Abilene, aren’t thrilled to be encircled by bulldozers around the clock.
(Meta is also building in Texas, though elsewhere in the state. This week the company announced a $1.5 billion data center in El Paso, near the New Mexico border, with one gigawatt of capacity expected online in 2028. El Paso isn’t near the Permian Basin, and Meta says the facility will be matched with 100% clean and renewable energy. One point for Meta.)
Even Elon Musk’s xAI, whose Memphis facility has generated considerable controversy this year, has fracking connections. Memphis Light, Gas and Water – which currently sells power to xAI but will eventually own the substations xAI is building – purchases natural gas on the spot market and pipes it to Memphis via two companies: Texas Gas Transmission Corp. and Trunkline Gas Company.
Texas Gas Transmission is a bidirectional pipeline carrying natural gas from Gulf Coast supply areas and several major hydraulically fractured shale formations through Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Trunkline Gas Company, the other Memphis supplier, also carries natural gas from fracked sources.
If you’re wondering why AI companies are pursuing this path, they’ll tell you it’s not just about electricity; it’s also about beating China.
That was the argument Chris Lehane made last week. Lehane, a veteran political operative who joined OpenAI as vice president of global affairs in 2024, laid out the case during an on-stage interview with TechCrunch.
“We believe that in the not-too-distant future, at least in the U.S., and really around the world, we are going to need to be generating in the neighborhood of a gigawatt of energy a week,” Lehane said. He pointed to China’s massive energy buildout: 450 gigawatts and 33 nuclear facilities constructed in the last year alone.
When TechCrunch asked about Stargate’s decision to build in economically challenged areas like Abilene, or Lordstown, Ohio, where more gas-powered plants are planned, Lehane returned to geopolitics. “If we [as a country] do this right, you have an opportunity to re-industrialize countries, bring manufacturing back and also transition our energy systems so that we do the modernization that needs to take place.”
The Trump administration is certainly on board. The July 2025 executive order fast-tracks gas-powered AI data centers by streamlining environmental permits, offering financial incentives, and opening federal lands for projects using natural gas, coal, or nuclear power — while explicitly excluding renewables from support.
For now, most AI users remain largely unaware of the carbon footprint behind their dazzling new toys and work tools. They’re more focused on capabilities like Sora 2 – OpenAI’s hyperrealistic video-generation product that requires exponentially more energy than a simple chatbot – than on where the electricity comes from.
The companies are counting on this. They’ve positioned natural gas as the pragmatic, inevitable answer to AI’s exploding power demands. But the speed and scale of this fossil fuel buildout deserves more attention than it’s getting.
If this is a bubble, it won’t be pretty. The AI sector has become a circular firing squad of dependencies: OpenAI needs Microsoft needs Nvidia needs Broadcom needs Oracle needs data center operators who need OpenAI. They’re all buying from and selling to each other in a self-reinforcing loop. The Financial Times noted this week if the foundation cracks, there’ll be a lot of expensive infrastructure left standing around, both the digital and the gas-burning kind.
OpenAI’s ability alone to meet its obligations is “increasingly a concern for the wider economy,” the outlet wrote.
One key question that’s been largely absent from the conversation is whether all this new capacity is even necessary. A Duke University study found that utilities typically use only 53% of their available capacity throughout the year. That suggests significant room to accommodate new demand without constructing new power plants, as MIT Technology Review reported earlier this year.
The Duke researchers estimate that if data centers reduced electricity consumption by roughly half for just a few hours during annual peak demand periods, utilities could handle an additional 76 gigawatts of new load. That would effectively absorb the 65 gigawatts data centers are projected to need by 2029.
That kind of flexibility would allow companies to launch AI data centers faster. More importantly, it could provide a reprieve from the rush to build natural gas infrastructure, giving utilities time to develop cleaner alternatives.
But again, that would mean losing ground to an autocratic regime, per Lehane and many others in the industry, so instead, the natural gas building spree appears likely to saddle regions with more fossil-fuel plants and leave residents with soaring electricity bills to finance today’s investments, including long after the tech companies’ contracts expire.
Meta, for instance, has guaranteed it will cover Entergy’s costs for the new Louisiana generation for 15 years. Poolside’s lease with CoreWeave runs for 15 years. What happens to customers when those contracts end remains an open question.
Things may eventually change. A lot of private money is being funneled into small modular reactors and solar installations with the expectation that these cleaner energy alternatives will become more central energy sources for these data centers. Fusion startups like Helion and Commonwealth Fusion Systems have similarly raised substantial funding from those the front lines of AI, including Nvidia and Altman.
This optimism isn’t confined to private investment circles. The excitement has spilled over into public markets, where several “non-revenue-generating” energy companies that have managed to go public have truly anticipatory, market caps, based on the expectation that they will one day fuel these data centers.
In the meantime — which could still be decades — the most pressing concern is that the people who’ll be left holding the bag, financially and environmentally, never asked for any of this in the first place.
A new digital tasks program will be piloted for U.S. Uber drivers this year. Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The life of an Uber driver often involves stretches of downtime—waiting on ride requests or charging an electric vehicle’s battery. To make the most of those idle moments, Uber is launching a pilot program that allows drivers and couriers to make extra money by completing digital tasks that train A.I. models for Uber’s enterprise clients.
“Drivers have asked for more ways to earn, even when they’re not on the road,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. To address this request, drivers will soon be able to opt in for quick, in-app tasks ranging from uploading documents—such as restaurant menus or receipts—to providing everyday images and recording audio samples.
The pilot will launch later this fall as part of Uber’s AI Solutions Group, a division created last November to offer data-labeling services to other businesses. Its client list includes Aurora, a self-driving software developer; Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go; and Luma AI, a text-to-video generator. Until now, Uber AI Solutions has relied on independent gig workers to complete data-labeling tasks. The new program shifts those assignments to Uber’s own network of drivers and couriers, giving them access to additional income streams directly through the Driver app.
In addition to the upcoming U.S. launch, Uber has already been testing the initiative in more than 12 cities in India. “Until now, these tasks were completed by independent contractors outside the app,” said Megha Yethadka, the global head of Uber AI Solutions, in a September LinkedIn post describing the Indian pilot as “very promising.”
Before accepting a task, drivers will be able to see the expected pay rate and estimated completion time. They can only take on digital tasks while not actively signed in to drive or deliver for Uber.
Khosrowshahi first discussed Uber’s plans to introduce digital tasks at the Bloomberg Tech Summit in June, where he laid out a strategy to expand income opportunities of drivers and couriers over the next five to ten years. He described the data-labeling effort as a form of “knowledge work” emerging from the A.I. era and a way to provide new job options even as automation and autonomous vehicles threaten traditional driving roles.
Uber announced the digital tasks initiative yesterday (Oct. 16) during its annual Only on Uber event, which highlights new features inspired by driver and courier feedback. Other updates unveiled at the event included a new heat map tool showing demand hotspots, a rider rating filter that allows drivers to screen trip requests, and a delayed-ride guarantee offering extra pay when trips take longer than estimated.
Uber also announced an expansion of its women rider preference feature, which lets female drivers accept rides only from women passengers—a setting that has been used for more than 150 million trips and is activated weekly by one in four female drivers.
Did you find this article by typing in the name of a website associated with Elon Musk? Did it sound like you could invest in SpaceX, Neuralink, or one of Musk’s AI ventures like Grok and xAI? It’s fake. It’s 100%, without a doubt, completely fake.
I know you may not believe it, but please read on. Because this article could save you from losing a lot of money. Elon Musk is a very wealthy man. He’s worth $500 billion, according to Forbes, making him the wealthiest person on the planet. But Musk does not have a website dedicated to making other people rich.
You may have seen an ad on Facebook or maybe a video on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. It may have even looked like Elon Musk was talking about some amazing investment opportunity. Maybe it looked like Elon was raising money for a sick child. You may have even been asked to send money through gift cards or a bitcoin ATM. But it was fake. You need to believe us. Because it’s true.
Musk does not have a website selling cryptocurrencies. He doesn’t have a website for trading stocks. He doesn’t have a public website selling shares of his private companies like SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI, and X. The promotional video you saw is fake and probably used artificial intelligence tools to make it look like Elon Musk was saying something he never said.
People are losing millions
Did someone reach out to you on a social media site like Facebook or Instagram claiming to be Elon? Did they tell you to talk with them over Signal or Telegram or WhatsApp? That person is a scammer. Elon Musk does not reach out to people on websites and ask them for money. And if they haven’t already asked you to send money, that part is coming.
Again, you might be skeptical. A lot of people want to believe that Elon Musk is offering ways for the average person to become rich. But he’s not. Among other reasons, he doesn’t have time.
Here at Gizmodo, we’ve written about scammers impersonating Elon Musk for years.
There was the woman in Washington who lost $63,000 because she thought she was talking to Elon.
There was the person who lost over $18,000 watching a video livestream they thought was for Tesla.
There was also the Florida principal who sent an Elon Musk scammer a check for $100,000.
People have literally been losing millions of dollars to scammers over the years because they thought they were investing in something approved by Elon Musk. But it was all fake.
Scam AI Videos
It’s incredible what can be accomplished with AI these days. You can make people appear to say things they never said. For example, here’s an ad we spotted below. Elon never said any of that.
Fake Elon Websites
All of the websites below are scams. And while Gizmodo is often reluctant to advertise the web domains of scammers, because it risks inadvertently driving more people to scammy websites, using the names of the scams is the only way to help get the word out that these specific websites will steal your money.
And this list only scratches the surface. These are some of the domains that have been reported to the FTC, but there are so many more out there.
ceomusk.org [SCAM]
elonbitcoin.fun [SCAM]
elonchristmas.com [SCAM]
fastmars.net [SCAM]
investmuskspace.icu [SCAM]
marshome.us [SCAM]
marsway.net [SCAM]
marsyox.com [SCAM]
marsvalue.net [SCAM]
myteslatoken.com [SCAM]
official2xMusk.com [SCAM]
shippingteslamail.com [SCAM]
tesla-clubs.com [SCAM]
tesla-prize-x.com [SCAM]
teslaminingprogram.com [SCAM]
teslaminingplatform.aphatrad.com [SCAM]
teslaoption.com [SCAM]
teslapresale.net [SCAM]
tesla.token-presale.org [SCAM]
teslatoken-presale.online [SCAM]
telsaxmarketing.com [SCAM]
tsla-marketspro.com [SCAM]
teslgets.com [SCAM]
tsl-xspace.pw [SCAM]
x-coin-platform.io [SCAM]
Scam Names
There are also scams that you may know by various names that aren’t dedicated websites, but are being spread through social media platforms. Some of the common ones we’ve seen are below.
Elon Musk Fan Page Membership Card
Elon Musk x Donald Trump Crypto Giveaway
Space Stock Mining
Tesla Bitcoin
Tesla Token
Tesla Mining
Neuralink Crypto Token
SpaceX Token
Please believe us. It’s not real.
Maybe someone sent you this article. Maybe you found it through Google. Please know that visiting these websites and “investing” in them will only lead you to heartache and pain.
The people who’ve been scammed at these sites often feel foolish afterward. And we don’t want you to feel foolish. We want you to avoid just handing your money away for nothing.
If you’re interested in investing, there are plenty of reputable places to do that. You can even invest in Musk’s company, Tesla, if you want to buy stock in that company through a reputable stockbroker. All investing involves risks, but the websites we’ve featured here aren’t just risks where you might make some money or you might lose some money.
If you give any of these websites your money, you will only lose. We promise you.
Have you been scammed and want to tell your story? You can email the author of this article at [email protected].
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, now has a new chief financial officer: Former Morgan Stanley banker Anthony Armstrong, the Financial Times reported, citing anonymous sources.
Armstrong, who previously advised Musk during the Twitter deal, will oversee the finances of both xAI and X, which were merged in April, the report said. The former banker has been working with xAI for several weeks and was only recently appointed as CFO, the FT added.
xAI has been without a CFO since its previous finance head, Mike Liberatore, left the company in July, and Armstrong’s appointment follows a slate of high-profile executive departures at both xAI and X.
xAI’s general counsel, Robert Keele, left the company in August after a little more than a year on the job. Raghu Rao, a senior lawyer, also departed around the same time, and Igor Babuschkin, one of xAI’s co-founders, in August said he was leaving the company to launch his own VC firm dedicated to AI safety research. Linda Yaccarino, former CEO of X, also resigned in July.
Armstrong will take over from X’s current CFO, Mahmoud Reza Banki, who is leaving the company, the FT reported.
xAI did not immediately return a request for comment.
Peter Thiel, PayPal’s first CEO, turned his fintech fortune into a far-reaching empire of influence spanning venture capital, politics and power. Marco Bello/Getty Images
In 2007, Fortune magazine reimagined a classic mafia scene with a Silicon Valley twist: 13 male founders and early employees of PayPal, all long gone from the company, posed at a San Francisco café with slicked-back hair, poker chips and dozens of whiskey glasses. The crowd included some of the most recognizable names in today’s tech scene, like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. The magazine dubbed them the “PayPal mafia,” not for their time at the fintech company, but for their outsized impact on Silicon Valley through the companies they launched afterward.
PayPal went public in early 2002 and was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion the same year. Most of its early employees left the company after the acquisition. They went on to found YouTube, SpaceX and LinkedIn, among other legendary names in Silicon Valley. However, like their cinematic namesake, the group hasn’t avoided controversy. These former colleagues have built billion-dollar businesses while also finding themselves in the crosshairs of public criticism.
For instance, Thiel has faced controversy over his political affiliations and, most notably, for funding Hulk Hogan’s 2012 lawsuit against Gawker Media with $10 million — a case that ultimately drove the online media company into bankruptcy. Musk has also faced criticism for his takeover of Twitter and his prior role in the Trump administration, where he led widespread federal employee firings.
Here’s what they are up to these days:
Peter Thiel: venture capitalist
Peter Thiel. Marco Bello/Getty Images
Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Luke Nosek founded PayPal in 1998, originally as a software security company. After merging with Elon Musk’s X.com (unrelated to the social media platform he owns today), PayPal shifted its focus to digital payments.
Thiel served as CEO from 1998 until 2002, leaving after the company was sold to eBay. He then co-founded Palantir Technologies, a major U.S. government contractor providing data analytics services. The company now has a market capitalization of $439 billion.
Thiel is also known as a prolific angel investor. He co-founded Clarium Capital, Founders Fund, Valar Ventures and Mithril Capital. In 2004, Thiel became Facebook’s first outside investor after acquiring a 10.2 percent stake in the company for $500,000.
Thiel is among the many former PayPal employees who have entered political and high-profile public arenas. An active donor to the Republican Party, Thiel supported Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign but withheld donations during the 2024 election. He is also credited with helping JD Vance reach the Vice Presidential ticket.
Elon Musk: entrepreneur, the world’s richest person
Elon Musk. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Elon Musk briefly served as PayPal’s CEO before being ousted by the board in 2000. He went on to build one of the most influential portfolios in technology, spanning electric vehicles, space exploration, social media and A.I.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 and has led Tesla since 2008. He also founded Neuralink and The Boring Company, expanding his reach into brain-computer interfaces and infrastructure. In 2022, Musk gained global attention for acquiring Twitter for $44 billion, later rebranding it as X.
His ties to A.I. run deep: Musk co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman in 2015 but left in 2018 over strategic disagreements. In 2023, he returned to the field by launching xAI, a research venture focused on building A.I. that is more understandable for humans.
Today, Musk is the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $400 billion. He is also perhaps the only PayPal alumnus to ascend into direct political influence. During the Trump administration, he led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a name shared with his cryptocurrency venture—before stepping down in May after clashing publicly with the President.
Max Levchin: computer scientist
Max Levchin. John Lamparski/Getty Images
Position at PayPal: co-founder, chief technology officer from 1998 to 2002
As PayPal’s chief technology officer, Max Levchin helped lead the company’s anti-fraud efforts by co-creating the Gausebeck-Levchin test—the foundation for the widely used CAPTCHA security tool. After leaving PayPal, he launched the media-sharing platform Slide in 2004, which was acquired by Google in 2010. Levchin briefly served as Google’s vice president of engineering until Slide was shut down the following year.
In 2012, he co-founded Affirm, a leading “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) company, where he continues to serve as CEO. Today, Affirm has a market capitalization of $27.5 billion, with 21.9 million consumers and more than 350,000 merchant partners on its platform.
Levchin has also held board positions at Yahoo and Yelp. In 2015, he became the first Silicon Valley executive appointed to the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s advisory board, emphasizing the importance of collaboration between companies and regulators.
Reid Hoffman: entrepreneur, investor
Reid Hoffman. Kimberly White/Getty Images for WIRED
Before joining PayPal, Hoffman worked as a senior user experience architect at Apple, contributing to the company’s online social network eWorld. He later became director of product management at Fujitsu. After his online dating startup, SocialNet, folded, Hoffman joined PayPal in 2000 as chief operating officer.
In 2003, he co-founded the career networking site LinkedIn. Following Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn in 2017, Hoffman joined Microsoft’s board, a move that greatly increased his wealth.
Over the years, Hoffman has served on the boards of Airbnb and OpenAI, where he was also an early investor. Through the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, he has backed dozens of A.I. startups. In 2022, he co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman, who now serves as CEO. Earlier this year, he teamed up with cancer researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee to launch Manas AI, a startup focused on drug discovery.
David Sacks: investor, White House A.I. and Crypto Czar
David Sacks currently serves as the White House A.I. and Crypto Czar. JC Olivera/Variety via Getty Images
Position at PayPal: chief operating officer from 1999 to 2002
Since leaving PayPal, David Sacks has built a career spanning film, tech, investing and politics. In 2005, he produced and financed a political satire that earned two Golden Globe nominations. The following year, he founded Geni.com, a genealogy-focused social network that later spun off Yammer, one of the earliest enterprise social networking platforms. He went on to co-found Craft Ventures, the startup Glue, and the podcast platform Callin.
Jeremy Stoppelman joined Musk’s X.com in 1999 and became vice president of engineering after its transition to PayPal. In 2004, he co-founded Yelp, where he has served as CEO ever since. Under his leadership, the company turned down a 2010 acquisition offer from Google and went public two years later. Stoppelman’s net worth is estimated at more than $100 million.
Ken Howery: investor, U.S. ambassador
Position at PayPal: chief financial officer from 1998 to 2002
Ken Howery served as PayPal’s chief financial officer from 1998 to 2002. After PayPal’s sale to eBay, he became eBay’s director of corporate development until 2003. He later joined Peter Thiel at Clarium Capital as vice president of private equity and went on to co-found Founders Fund as a partner. Beyond investing, he is a member of the Explorers Club, a nonprofit dedicated to scientific exploration, and an advisor to Kiva, the micro-lending nonprofit founded by former PayPal colleague Premal Shah.
Howery is also among the former PayPal executives who have moved into politics. He has donated at least $1 million to Donald Trump’s campaign through Elon Musk’s political action committee. During Trump’s first term, Howery was appointed U.S. ambassador to Sweden and today serves as the U.S. ambassador to Denmark.
Roeloth Botha: venture capitalist
Roelof Botha joined PayPal as director of corporate development shortly before graduating from Stanford University. He later became vice president of finance and went on to serve as chief financial officer until the company’s acquisition by eBay.
Position at PayPal: software architect from 1998 to 2003
Companies later founded: Yelp, Learnirvana
Russel Simmons helped design PayPal’s payment system as a software architect. After leaving the company, he and fellow PayPal alum Jeremy Stoppelman set out to build a platform for restaurant reviews. With a $1 million investment from Max Levchin, they launched Yelp in July 2004. Simmons served as chief technology officer until his departure in 2010. At the time, Yelp said he would remain a “significant” shareholder, though the size of his stake—and whether he still holds it—remains unclear.
In 2014, Simmons co-founded Learnirvana, an online learning platform.
Andrew McCormack: entrepreneur
Position at PayPal: assistant to Thiel from July 2001 to November 2002
Companies later founded: Valar Ventures
Andrew McCormack began his career as an assistant to Peter Thiel at PayPal and followed him into subsequent ventures. From November 2002 to April 2003, he oversaw operations at Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital.
In 2010, McCormack co-founded Valar Ventures with Thiel and James Fitzgerald, focusing on fintech investments. He remains a general partner at the firm.
Luke Nosek: investor
Position at PayPal: co-founder and vice president of marketing and strategy from 1998 to 2002
Companies later founded: Founders Fund, Gigafund
In 2005, Luke Nosek joined Peter Thiel and Ken Howery to launch Founders Fund, a San Francisco–based venture capital firm that has backed companies such as Airbnb, Lyft and SpaceX. While his exact net worth is unclear, Nosek has made substantial investments through his venture firms. At Founders Fund, he led one of the firm’s earliest major deals with a $20 million investment in SpaceX, later serving on its board.
In 2017, Nosek left to co-found Gigafund, which went on to invest $1 billion in SpaceX, according to the company. He also sits on the board of ResearchGate.
Premal Shah: entrepreneur
Position at Paypal: product manager
Companies later founded: Kiva
Three years after leaving PayPal, Premal Shah co-founded Kiva, a nonprofit that provides loans to entrepreneurs in underserved communities worldwide. He also serves on the boards of other nonprofits, including the Center for Humane Technology, the Change.org Foundation, Watsi and VolunteerMatch.
Keith Rabois: investor
Position at PayPal: executive vice president of business development
After leaving his executive role at PayPal, Keith Rabois became an active investor, backing companies including Slide, YouTube and Palantir. He also invested in LinkedIn, where he served as vice president of business and corporate development, and Square, where he was chief operating officer.
Rabois joined venture capital firm Khosla Ventures from 2013 to 2019 and was a partner at Founders Fund from 2019 to 2024.
The Elon Musk-helmed company saw its delivery numbers soar after a shaky few quarters. Photo by Katherine KY Cheng/Getty Images
The end of U.S. electric vehicle tax credits is expected to pose long-term challenges for industry leaders like Tesla. But the policy’s looming expiration fueled a surge in sales in the latest quarter. Tesla delivered 497,099 vehicles in the July-September quarter, a record high and up 7 percent from the same quarter last year. The strong quarter marks a turnaround for the carmaker, which has struggled with intensifying EV competition and growing backlash over CEO Elon Musk’s political activity. Its previous quarterly results showed deliveries of 384,122, a 13.5 percent year-over-year drop and the company’s second consecutive decline.
The rush in sales was driven in large part by the September 30 termination of federal EV tax credits, which offered up to $7,500 per purchase. The policy change, enacted earlier this year by President Donald Trump, spurred buyers to close deals before the deadline. Tesla wasn’t the only beneficiary—Cox Automotive projects total U.S. EV sales in the third quarter will reach 410,000, a 21 percent increase over last year.
“This was a great bounce back quarter for [Tesla] to lay the groundwork for deliveries moving forward,” said Dan Ives, a Wedbush Securities analyst, in a client note. Nevertheless, “EV demand is expected to fall with the EV tax credit expiration,” he warned. Tesla shares are down by more than 4 percent today (Oct. 2).
Whether Tesla can sustain this momentum remains uncertain. Musk has increasingly positioned his company around a future dominated by self-driving cars and robotics, rolling out autonomous cars in Austin this summer. But for now, the bulk of Tesla’s revenue continues to come from EV sales, accounting for nearly three-quarters of its $22.5 billion in revenue last quarter.
The company faces particular headwinds in Europe, where political backlash has weighed heavily on sales. In the first eight months of 2025, Tesla registrations in European Union countries fell 43 percent compared to the same period last year, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. August alone saw a 36 percent year-over-year drop. Overall, however, EV adoption in the EU continues to climb, with market share rising to 15.8 percent from last year’s 12.6 percent.
In China, Tesla is also losing ground. Shipments from its Shanghai Gigafactory reportedly fell 4 percent year-over-year in August, marking declines in seven of the past eight months. In an effort to combat local EV rivals, Tesla recently introduced its Model Y L to the region.
One bright spot for the company is its energy storage unit. The unit deployed 12.5 GWh of storage products over the past three months, up more than 80 percent from last year. The business, which includes Megapack and Powerwall battery systems, is gaining traction with utilities and companies expanding their A.I. infrastructure. Musk’s own A.I. startup, xAI, was among its clients, contributing nearly 2 percent of Tesla’s $10 billion in energy revenue last year.
Elon Musk says his company xAI is planning an alternative to Wikipedia. He first mentioned the so-called “Grokipedia” after Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who has been critical of the platform he helped to build, joined former Fox News host and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson on his podcast.
“We are building Grokipedia @xAI,” Musk posted Tuesday on social media platform X. “Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia. Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”
Carlson posted his podcast episode with Sanger to X on Monday. During the over 90-minute conversation, Sanger inflamed the far right by sharing sources that Wikipedia has flagged for attribution, as well as sources that have been “fully greenlit.”
“The blacklisted sources are Breitbart, Daily Caller, Epoch Times, Fox News, New York Post, The Federalist, so you can’t use those as sources on Wikipedia,” Sanger told Carlson.
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The problem with this, as The Daily Beast noted, is that only Breitbart is officially blacklisted, whereas the others are considered either “generally unreliable” or “deprecated,” meaning they can be used for some citation purposes such as uncontroversial self-descriptions. Furthermore, Wikipedia considers Fox News’ reporting on politics and science to be “generally unreliable,” but categorizes its other reporting as “no consensus,” meaning it is marginally reliable. It’s also worth noting that Wikipedia also considers some left-leaning media companies such as the aforementioned Daily Beast and HuffPost Politics as only marginally reliable.
Even so, the episode set off a wave of conservative backlash on X. Musk’s PayPal mafia colleague and current Trump administration AI and crypto czar David Sacks called Wikipedia “hopelessly biased.” Social Capital founder and CEO Chamath Palihapitiya also chimed in on X, describing Wikipedia as a “massive psy-op.”
“I think Elon is unhappy that Wikipedia is not for sale,” Wikipedia’s other co-founder Jimmy Wales posted on X at the time. “I hope his campaign to defund us results in lots of donations from people who care about the truth. If Elon wanted to help, he’d be encouraging kind and thoughtful intellectual people he agrees with to engage.”
Musk didn’t share many details about what a so-called Grokipedia might entail. But he did call on X users to “join @xAI and help build Grokipedia, an open source knowledge repository that is vastly better than Wikipedia,” adding, “This will be available to the public with no limits on use.”
After Musk announced his intentions to launch his own version of Wikipedia, powered by his controversial chatbot, Grok, Sanger expressed his own reservations about the plan.
“Let’s hope it won’t be as biased as Grok itself,” he wrote on X.
Elon Musk has long complained about Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia that’s considered a crown jewel of the internet. And now it seems like the billionaire is finally going to launch a competitor.
“We are building Grokipedia @xAI,” Musk tweeted Tuesday. “Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia. Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”
The Tesla CEO has previously insisted that Wikipedia is too “woke” and wants to offer an alternative encyclopedia with more right-wing “facts” about the world. Musk has referred to Wikipedia as “Wokipedia” at least half a dozen times in recent years.
Musk, who spent over $270 million to get President Donald Trump elected, launched his artificial intelligence company xAI in 2023 and touts his AI chatbot Grok as a superior product. But Grok often presents facts about the world that Musk doesn’t agree with. And his attempts to tinker with Grok to become more right-wing have seen mixed success.
Two high-profile incidents with Grok were an embarrassment for Musk, including the time Grok randomly responded to queries with unrelated conspiracy theories about white farmers being murdered in South Africa. A couple of months later, Grok went full Nazi, praising Hitler and endorsing the idea of rounding up Jews in concentration camps.
Musk never took blame for making Grok so buggy, but both incidents came after the CEO complained on X that his AI chatbot wasn’t responding to factual questions the way that he wanted. And it seems likely that Grokipedia will almost certainly meet similar limitations.
Musk and xAI haven’t released any information about how Grokipedia will operate, including whether it will be 100% AI-generated content. It’s also unclear whether Grokipedia will have dedicated URLs for various topics that anyone can visit or if it will be some kind of modified version of Grok that spits out answers to various questions.
“Join @xAI and help build Grokipedia, an open source knowledge repository that is vastly better than Wikipedia! This will be available to the public with no limits on use,” Musk tweeted.
Join @xAI and help build Grokipedia, an open source knowledge repository that is vastly better than Wikipedia!
If the user interface is just a chatbot like Grok, it’s unclear how that would be different from the Grok that now exists. xAI didn’t respond to questions on Tuesday about how Grokipedia would work, nor when it would launch.
Musk also quote-tweeted Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, on Tuesday, who shared nine changes he wanted to see the dominant online encyclopedia adopt, including:
End decision-making by “consensus”
Enable competing articles
Abolish source blacklists
Revive the original neutrality policy
Repeal “Ignore All Rules”
Reveal who Wikipedia’s leaders are
Let the public rate articles
End permanent blocking
Adopt a legislative process
Musk called them “good suggestions.” Sanger left Wikipedia back in 2002 and hasn’t had any formal involvement with it since. He’s been a critic of the project for decades and recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to whine about how it’s biased against conservatives.
The magic of Wikipedia is that anyone can contribute information, cite a source, and it’s policed by contributors and editors who mostly try to keep things as objective and factual as possible while citing reliable sources. Generative AI tools like Grok create sentences by relying on their training data, and it’s difficult to tinker with the weights to prioritize a right-wing view of the world without going full Nazi. We saw that play out in real-time twice now at scale, all thanks to Musk.
There are a lot of big questions that haven’t been answered about what Grokipedia will look like. But this wouldn’t be the first time conservatives have tried to launch their own Wikipedia competitor. Conservapedia was launched in 2006 and is widely regarded as a joke by anyone who tries to wade through its ridiculous articles.
Even Conservapedia’s right-wing bias doesn’t seem to treat Musk very well, as you can see from this excerpt taken from his page at the site:
Musk apparently does not hire conservatives in key positions, and is a cheerleader for giving foreigners top jobs in America. He wants expanded use of visas to import foreigners, and most of his Tesla cars are made in China. This is contrary to the America First position of MAGA supporters. Personally, Musk fathers many children without being a daily father to them.
No wonder Musk is trying to build his own Wikipedia. Even the right-wing copycats don’t cut him much slack. At least Conservapedia did him the favor of not mentioning those two Nazi-style salutes on the day Trump was inaugurated.
Elon Musk’s xAI is suing OpenAI, alleging that the ChatGPT maker has stolen its trade secrets. The lawsuit comes after the company recently sued a former employee, Xuechen Li, for allegedly stealing confidential information from the company before taking a job at OpenAI.
In its latest lawsuit, which was reported bySherwood, xAI says that Li’s alleged actions are part of “a broader and deeply troubling pattern of trade secret misappropriation, unfair competition, and intentional interference with economic relationships by OpenAI.” According to xAI’s lawyers, OpenAI also hired two other xAI employees who stole proprietary information from Musk’s company.
“Another early xAI engineer—Jimmy Fraiture—was also harvesting xAI’s source code and airdropping it to his personal devices to take to OpenAI, where he now works,” the lawsuit states. “Meanwhile, a senior finance executive brought another piece of the puzzle to OpenAI—xAI’s ‘secret sauce’ of rapid data center deployment—with no intention to abide by his legal obligations to xAI.”
“This new lawsuit is the latest chapter in Mr Musk’s ongoing harassment. We have no tolerance for any breaches of confidentiality, nor any interest in trade secrets from other labs,” OpenAI said in a statement the company shared with Engadget.
Musk, of course, has a complicated history with the ChatGPT maker, and this isn’t the first time his rival AI company has sued OpenAI. Last month, xAI filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Apple over Grok’s placement on App Store charts. Musk alleged that ChatGPT rank in the top spot represented an “unequivocal antitrust violation.” Musk has also filed numerous lawsuits against OpenAI over its relationship with Microsoft and its move to become a for-profit company.
A few months after the release of Grok 4 and an extremely problematic antisemitic meltdown of its chatbot, xAI is already trying to move on with its latest AI model. Elon Musk’s xAI announced the release of Grok 4 Fast, a faster, more efficient reasoning model compared to its recent predecessor. According to xAI, Grok 4 Fast offers similar performance to Grok 4 while using 40 percent fewer thinking tokens on average.
Along with faster results, xAI said Grok 4 Fast “results in a 98% reduction in price to achieve the same performance on frontier benchmarks as Grok 4,” whether it’s handling tasks that involve writing code or just browsing the web for quick responses. Similar to OpenAI’s GPT-5 that alternates between a smart, efficient model and a deeper reasoning model, xAI’s latest update includes a unified architecture that can transition between handling complex requests with its “reasoning” model and quick responses through its “non-reasoning model.”
In tests on LMArena, a platform that pits AI models against each other and provides side-by-side comparisons, Grok 4 Fast ranks first in search-related tasks and eighth in text-related tasks. xAI made Grok 4 Fast available for all users, including the free ones, on web, iOS and Android. However, with how competitive the LLM race is getting, it’s only a matter of time before Google releases the next-gen version of Gemini or Anthropic updates the Claude Opus model beyond the recently released 4.1 version.
Elon Musk’s xAI has lost a large number of top executives in recent months—so many that onlookers have begun to wonder what’s causing the high turnover rate. Now, new reporting from the Wall Street Journal suggests some of those executives may have left due to internal conflict over the management style at the company and disagreements over its financial projections.
The list of executives who have recently departed Musk’s firm includes Mike Liberatore, the company’s former chief financial officer, who left xAI in July. Liberatore’s departure was notable since he had only joined the company in April, making his entire tenure with xAI about three months. A few days ago, it was reported that Liberatore had been hired by OpenAI, which is, of course, run by Musk’s much-hated rival, Sam Altman.
Other recent departures include the company’s general counsel, Robert Keele, who, according to his LinkedIn, joined the company in May of 2024 and left in early August after just over a year with the firm. In a post on his LinkedIn about the departure, Keele said he loved his “two toddlers” and didn’t “get to see them enough.” He added: “The job was a dream, the team, incredible. Working with Elon on this tech, at this time, was the adventure of a lifetime,” while noting, somewhat ambiguously, that there was “daylight between our worldviews.”
Yet another high-level departure involved Linda Yaccarino, the former CEO of X (Musk’s social media site, which is owned by xAI, and serves as the primary interface by which web users can interact with the company’s chatbot, Grok), who left the company in July after having toughed it out for over two years, having been brought on in May of 2023. Yaccarino, who once uttered the phrase “If not for X, there would be darkness,” said, at the time of her departure, that she was “immensely grateful to” Musk for having entrusted her “with the responsibility of protecting free speech,” and for “turning the company around.”
Sources Claim Disputes Preceded Departures
So, why have so many high-level executives been leaving Musk’s company? The WSJ report broaches the possibility of an answer: clashes over managerial styles and the company’s finances. The report is based on claims made by “people familiar with the matter” and does not identify which departed executives it is referring to. The Journal writes:
Several executives at xAI left after clashing with two of Elon Musk’s closest advisers over concern about the startup’s management and financial health, according to people familiar with the matter. Those advisers, Jared Birchall and John Hering, oversee the day-to-day operations of xAI while Musk, as chief executive officer, makes final decisions. Some of xAI’s executives voiced objections internally over how Birchall and Hering were trying to run the company on Musk’s behalf and felt there was no formal chain of command, the people said.
Some xAI executives said they left because they were concerned that some of the company’s financial projections were unrealistic, the people said.
Birchall, commonly referred to as Musk’s “right-hand man,” is tasked with operating a large amount of the billionaire’s empire, and occupies a number of important executive roles at his orgs, including Excession and the Musk Foundation. He is also the CEO of Neuralink andan advisor at xAI.
Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, referred us to statements he previously provided to the Journal. Those statements threw cold water on the idea that there had been a dispute at the company or that the company’s financials were “in any way improper.” Spiro also said: “The suggestion that the financials are in any way improper is false and defamatory.” A spokesperson for xAI did not return Gizmodo’s request for comment but told the Journal that Musk “leads xAI with unwavering vision and commitment, making it his top priority in advancing AI for the benefit of humanity.”
A Tumultuous Time for the Tech Industry
The war for AI supremacy has spurred intense competition between companies, and it’s not just Musk’s firm that has seen turnover. Meta has been on the warpath to hire new AI engineers and has been offering up mind-blowing salaries to lure talent from every corner of the industry. Still, a report in June found that Meta’s retention rate was lower than rival firm Anthropic. That same report claimed that OpenAI and DeepMind were also losing engineers to Anthropic.
In addition to corporate competition, personal rivalries have also complicated the industry outlook. Musk’s personal vendetta against OpenAI’s Altman has spawned an ongoing legal battle between the Tesla billionaire and OpenAI, which will surely cost both firms dearly in legal fees, but which, so far, hasn’t stopped OpenAI from maintaining its edge as the leading company in its industry. In August, xAI also sued a former engineer after he left the firm and went to work for OpenAI, accusing him of having stolen trade secrets.
AI might be coming for our jobs, but capitalist pressures appear to be coming for the people responsible for developing AI. Wired reported over 200 people working on Google’s AI products, including its chatbot Gemini and the AI Overviews it displays in search results, were recently laid off—joining the ranks of unfortunate former employees of xAI and Meta, who have also been victims of “restructuring” as companies that poured billions of dollars into AI development are trying to figure out how to make that money back.
Per Wired, most of the people working on Google’s AI products were contractors rather than Google employees. Many worked at GlobalLogic, a software development company owned by Hitachi. According to the report, most of the GlobalLogic workers who got cut off from Google were working as raters, working to ensure the quality of AI responses. Most are based in the US, work with English-language content, and many have a master’s or a PhD in their field of expertise.
At least some workers hit by this layoff were told the cuts were the result of a “ramp-down” on the project, but at least a few workers seem skeptical of that reason. Some believe the cuts may be related to worker protests over pay and job security concerns, per Wired. The publication also reported that documents from GlobalLogic indicate the company may be using human raters to train a system that can automate the rating process, which would leave AI to moderate AI.
The folks tasked with tightening up Google’s AI outputs are far from the only ones in the industry getting squeezed. According to Business Insider, Elon Musk’s xAI recently laid off at least 500 workers who were tasked with doing data annotation. The layoffs appear to be a part of a shuffling of efforts within the company, which is moving away from “generalist” data annotators and ramping up its “specialists.” Given that Google just cut contractors who would likely fall under that “specialist” label, it probably feels a bit precarious out there.
It’s been a tough go for people who are actually handling the data that feeds AI tools. Shortly after Meta invested in data labeling firm Scale AI, the company cut 14% of its staff, including 200 full-timers and about 500 contractors. Meta itself is reportedly looking seriously at downsizing its AI department as it keeps shifting priorities and trying to figure out how to get a leg up in the AI race.
It’s also hard not to look at the layoffs of lower-level workers and contractors without thinking about the multi-million dollar job offers being thrown at AI specialists to secure their talents, but this tends to be how things go: the people doing the grunt work that must be done to keep the gears turning are considered replaceable while more and more money flows to the top to people who no one really knows what they do, but they make a lot of money so it must be important.
Elon Musk’s A.I. firm is scaling back on “generalist A.I. tutors.” Allison Robbert/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Data annotation may not be the most glamorous job in Silicon Valley, but it’s indispensable for A.I. developers and has made companies like Scale AI multibillion-dollar ventures overnight. Training large language models requires armies of humans to label text, images and video so A.I. systems can learn from them. Now, Elon Musk’s xAI is reshaping how that work is done by shifting away from general contractors and toward experts in specialized fields it calls “A.I. tutors.”
In that vein, xAI recently laid off at least 500 generalist annotators, as reported by Business Insider. The cuts affected about one-third of the company’s 1,500-person annotation team. In emails cited by the outlet, executives described a “strategic pivot” toward hiring domain experts as specialist A.I. tutors.
“Specialist A.I. tutors at xAI are adding huge value,” said xAI in a Sep. 12 post on X that declared the company will “immediately surge” its specialist A.I. team by tenfold. The company did not respond to requests for comment from Observer.
What data annotation is and why it matters
Human annotators play a crucial role in fine-tuning raw data, ensuring it can be used effectively to train models. But the work has long been fraught. Firms that outsource this work, like Scale AI, have faced lawsuits from contractors alleging wage theft, misclassification and exposure to disturbing content without safeguards.
Unlike rivals that rely heavily on third parties, xAI employs a large in-house annotation team. Other A.I. leaders—including OpenAI and Google—have worked with Scale in the past, though both distanced themselves from the firm after Metatook a 49 percent stake and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead its new superintelligence division. Today, many also contract with competitor Surge AI, which counts Anthropic and Microsoft among its clients.
xAI itself has previously tapped third-party annotators, but is now doubling down on its own staff. The company has posted openings for more than a dozen specialist tutor roles spanning A.I. safety, data science, STEM, finance, Japanese and even “memes and headline commentary.” The latter position involves improving Grok’s ability to “recognize and analyze memes, trolling and virality mechanisms,” according to the listing.
Qualifications for these roles are steep. For STEM specialists, candidates must hold a master’s or Ph.D. in a relevant field—or have earned medals in competitions like the International Mathematical Olympiad. xAI says tutors can work part-time or full-time and earn between $45 and $100 per hour.
The changes come as xAI faces wider turnover beyond its annotation team. In July, the company’s head of infrastructure, Uday Ruddarraju, left for rival OpenAI. Co-founder Igor Babushkin departed the following month to launch a venture capital firm. And in September, Mike Liberatore resigned after just three months as chief financial officer.
Elon Musk’s startup, xAI, just cut down its biggest team by a third.
The AI startup laid off at least 500 workers on its 1,500-person data annotation team on Friday night, reports Business Insider. The move means the team, which leads AI training, is down to about 1,000 workers. The group is tasked with refining xAI’s chatbot, Grok, by teaching it how to contextualize data.
The company asked the team’s employees to complete a series of tests on Thursday night that would help classify them based on their strengths and interests. The tests covered areas like coding, finance, and medicine. More than 200 employees completed the tests, which had a Friday morning deadline, per BI.
On Friday night, xAI notified some employees on the team that they were being laid off via email that said the company was looking for more “specialist AI tutors,” with deep knowledge of disciplines like science, technology, and finance, and cutting back its employment of “general AI tutor roles” without that specialized knowledge. Generalist AI tutors take on a range of broader tasks, like annotating videos and writing assignments.
“This strategic pivot will take effect immediately,” the email, which was obtained by BI, read. “As part of this shift in focus, we no longer need most generalist AI tutor positions, and your employment with xAI will conclude.”
xAI CEO Elon Musk. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Workers were told that they would lose access to company systems immediately, but that they would still be paid their salaries through either the end of their contract or Nov. 30.
Amidst the layoffs, xAI is still hiring: The startup recently advertised for open positions for specialist AI tutors. In a post on X last week, xAI wrote that it was planning to “immediately” grow its specialist team tenfold and was “hiring across domains” like medicine and finance.
Specialist AI tutors at xAI are adding huge value. We will immediately surge our Specialist AI tutor team by 10x!
We are hiring across domains like STEM, finance, medicine, safety, and many more. Come join us to help build truth-seeking AGI!https://t.co/htpc2RijLG
xAI has been rapidly growing its data annotation team. Since February, the startup has added about 700 employees to the group. According to xAI’s website, compensation for AI tutor roles can range from $45 to $100 per hour. The company had listed 13 open AI tutor positions at the time of writing.
The xAI layoffs follow several senior-level departures from the startup, including the company’s former Chief Financial Officer Mike Liberatore, who left at the end of July. That same month, xAI launched Grok 4, its most advanced model yet, calling it the “most intelligent model in the world” with high performance on benchmark tests.
Elon Musk’s startup, xAI, just cut down its biggest team by a third.
The AI startup laid off at least 500 workers on its 1,500-person data annotation team on Friday night, reports Business Insider. The move means the team, which leads AI training, is down to about 1,000 workers. The group is tasked with refining xAI’s chatbot, Grok, by teaching it how to contextualize data.
These emails reportedly announce an immediate “strategic pivot,” with the company deciding to “accelerate the expansion and prioritization of our specialist AI tutors, while scaling back our focus on general AI tutor roles.”
“As part of this shift in focus, we no longer need most generalist AI tutor positions and your employment with xAI will conclude,” xAI reportedly wrote.
According to Business Insider, these cuts represent about one-third of xAI’s 1,500-person data annotation team — the team that works to label and prepare data used to train xAI’s chatbot Grok.
When contacted for confirmation, xAI pointed to a statement on X (the Musk-owned social network that it acquired earlier this year) declaring that the company “will immediately surge our Specialist AI tutor team by 10x.”
“We are hiring across domains like STEM, finance, medicine, safety, and many more,” the company said.
xAI has laid off at least 500 workers from its data annotation team, the company’s largest, according to Business Insider. The annotation team is in charge of categorizing and contextualizing raw data used to train Grok so that it can understand the world better. Business Insider says the laid off employees were informed via email on the evening of September 12, Friday, that it was going to downsize its team of general AI tutors. They were reportedly told that they would be paid their salaries until the end of their contracts on November 30, but their access to xAI’s systems had been cut off after they received the notice.
When Reuters asked the company for a comment, it referred to a post on X wherein it posted a call for specialist AI tutors instead. xAI said that it will “immediately surge [its] Specialist AI tutor team by 10x” and that it’s hiring across STEM fields. As specialist tutors, the new hires will be “enhancing [the company’s] AI technologies through high-quality inputs, labels and annotations using specialized software.” They’ll gather data and provide their own, not only in text format, but also through audio recordings and video sessions.
As Reuters has noted, the layoffs come after several high-profile departures from xAI, including the company’s chief financial officer Mike Liberatore. The company launched Grok 4 in July, calling it the “smartest AI in the world.” Elon Musk claimed during the model’s reveal that if you make Grok 4 take the SATs and the GREs, it would get near perfect results every time and can answer questions it’s never seen before. He also proclaimed that Grok is going to invent new tech maybe later this year, and that he would be shocked if it doesn’t happen next year.
Elon Musk, already the world’s richest person, could become the first trillionaire after the Tesla board unveiled a massive new pay package for its CEO to keep his focus on the troubled EV maker.The package would grant him additional shares of Tesla stock if the company is able to grow far beyond its current value, with a market capitalization far greater than any company has ever approached. Musk’s previous pay package, which added significantly to his massive wealth, also laid out ambitious growth plans that once appeared to be a reach – but which Tesla proved able to reach easily.The new pay package could grant Musk 423.7 million additional shares of Tesla stock. Those shares would be worth $143.5 billion at today’s stock value.But Musk would get those shares only if the value of Tesla stock increases significantly in coming years. The company stock would need to reach an overall value of $8.5 trillion for Musk to get all the shares, significantly above the current market capitalization of $1.1 trillion and roughly double the current market value of Nvidia (NVDA), the current most-valuable company on the market.The company’s proxy statement that laid out Musk’s payment plan also included a shareholder proposal that Tesla take a stake in privately-held xAI, the artificial intelligence company that Musk also owns. That could help Elon Musk further consolidate his growing business empire.XAI recently purchased X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought for $44 billion of his own money in 2022. The company did not take a position for or against that shareholder proposal, which does not give any details of how large a stake Tesla should take in xAI, and at what price.Musk currently owns 410 million shares of Tesla shares, worth $139 billion at Thursday’s closing price. That stake, along with his stakes in xAI, rocket company SpaceX, and several other companies he has started and runs, have made him the richest person on the planet, worth $378 billion according to Bloomberg’s billionaire tracker.He currently has options to buy an additional 304 million shares of Tesla, but a judge in Delaware has twice struck down that 2018 pay package that granted him those options as illegal. Those rulings came despite overwhelming approval by Tesla shareholders – twice. The company again has tried to grant those options to Musk this year, and adding in those options, he now owns 18% of the company’s shares.Tesla shares nearly doubled in value to a record-high price for its shares between election day and mid-December 2024, as investors bet that his close ties to President Donald Trump would be a boon for Tesla. But as Tesla faced protests and dropping sales and falling profits in backlash to those ties (before he had a falling out with Trump), all those things resulted in Tesla’s stock losing those gains. The shares have recovered some of those losses, but they are still down 26% from the December peak.Still, Musk and his fans on Wall Street have insisted the company is well positioned to grow even larger and more successful in the future. He has continued to predict that his plans for self-driving cars – including a robotaxi service – will create massive profits and value for shareholders. The robotaxis would provide rides to passengers and also allow Tesla owners to rent out their cars for driverless rides when not in use.Musk has also promised a line of humanoid robots that could bring in even more sales than Tesla’s car business.“It’s a big pay package but Tesla needs to keep its biggest asset in Musk as CEO,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told CNN Friday. Ives is one of the bigger Tesla bulls on Wall Street.“In this AI era Musk now will drive its next leg of growth,” Ives added. “The Board had a $1 trillion dollar decision and made the right one.”The board’s proxy statement spoke of the importance of keeping Musk focused on Tesla going forward. In addition to his many business interests, he remains active in politics, despite his falling out with President Trump. He has announced plans to form a third political party.Tesla, in its proxy statement, warned that it needed to incentivize Musk to focus his attention on growing the company. It said that during the negotiations on the pay package, “Musk also raised the possibility that he may pursue other interests that may afford him greater influence if he did not receive such assurances.”The board said it “believes that Mr. Musk singularly possesses the leadership characteristics necessary to transform Tesla and realize its long-term mission at an unparalleled level.”But, so far, those big ambitions have all been grand claims from a man and company that have often fallen short of their promises. Tesla is facing growing competition from Chinese EV makers. BYD, one of those Chinese automakers, is poised to pass Tesla for the most EV sales worldwide, even though it is not available for sale in the United States.Tesla also faces competition from other companies that are ahead of it in providing robotaxi services, including Waymo, the autonomous vehicle unit of Google parent Alphabet, which has its own service and has partnered with Uber in some cities.Shares of Tesla (TSLA) were slightly higher in premarket trading on the news.
Elon Musk, already the world’s richest person, could become the first trillionaire after the Tesla board unveiled a massive new pay package for its CEO to keep his focus on the troubled EV maker.
The package would grant him additional shares of Tesla stock if the company is able to grow far beyond its current value, with a market capitalization far greater than any company has ever approached. Musk’s previous pay package, which added significantly to his massive wealth, also laid out ambitious growth plans that once appeared to be a reach – but which Tesla proved able to reach easily.
The new pay package could grant Musk 423.7 million additional shares of Tesla stock. Those shares would be worth $143.5 billion at today’s stock value.
But Musk would get those shares only if the value of Tesla stock increases significantly in coming years. The company stock would need to reach an overall value of $8.5 trillion for Musk to get all the shares, significantly above the current market capitalization of $1.1 trillion and roughly double the current market value of Nvidia (NVDA), the current most-valuable company on the market.
The company’s proxy statement that laid out Musk’s payment plan also included a shareholder proposal that Tesla take a stake in privately-held xAI, the artificial intelligence company that Musk also owns. That could help Elon Musk further consolidate his growing business empire.
XAI recently purchased X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought for $44 billion of his own money in 2022. The company did not take a position for or against that shareholder proposal, which does not give any details of how large a stake Tesla should take in xAI, and at what price.
Musk currently owns 410 million shares of Tesla shares, worth $139 billion at Thursday’s closing price. That stake, along with his stakes in xAI, rocket company SpaceX, and several other companies he has started and runs, have made him the richest person on the planet, worth $378 billion according to Bloomberg’s billionaire tracker.
He currently has options to buy an additional 304 million shares of Tesla, but a judge in Delaware has twice struck down that 2018 pay package that granted him those options as illegal. Those rulings came despite overwhelming approval by Tesla shareholders – twice. The company again has tried to grant those options to Musk this year, and adding in those options, he now owns 18% of the company’s shares.
Tesla shares nearly doubled in value to a record-high price for its shares between election day and mid-December 2024, as investors bet that his close ties to President Donald Trump would be a boon for Tesla. But as Tesla faced protests and dropping sales and falling profits in backlash to those ties (before he had a falling out with Trump), all those things resulted in Tesla’s stock losing those gains. The shares have recovered some of those losses, but they are still down 26% from the December peak.
Still, Musk and his fans on Wall Street have insisted the company is well positioned to grow even larger and more successful in the future. He has continued to predict that his plans for self-driving cars – including a robotaxi service – will create massive profits and value for shareholders. The robotaxis would provide rides to passengers and also allow Tesla owners to rent out their cars for driverless rides when not in use.
Musk has also promised a line of humanoid robots that could bring in even more sales than Tesla’s car business.
“It’s a big pay package but Tesla needs to keep its biggest asset in Musk as CEO,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told CNN Friday. Ives is one of the bigger Tesla bulls on Wall Street.
“In this AI era Musk now will drive its next leg of growth,” Ives added. “The Board had a $1 trillion dollar decision and made the right one.”
The board’s proxy statement spoke of the importance of keeping Musk focused on Tesla going forward. In addition to his many business interests, he remains active in politics, despite his falling out with President Trump. He has announced plans to form a third political party.
Tesla, in its proxy statement, warned that it needed to incentivize Musk to focus his attention on growing the company. It said that during the negotiations on the pay package, “Musk also raised the possibility that he may pursue other interests that may afford him greater influence if he did not receive such assurances.”
The board said it “believes that Mr. Musk singularly possesses the leadership characteristics necessary to transform Tesla and realize its long-term mission at an unparalleled level.”
But, so far, those big ambitions have all been grand claims from a man and company that have often fallen short of their promises. Tesla is facing growing competition from Chinese EV makers. BYD, one of those Chinese automakers, is poised to pass Tesla for the most EV sales worldwide, even though it is not available for sale in the United States.
Tesla also faces competition from other companies that are ahead of it in providing robotaxi services, including Waymo, the autonomous vehicle unit of Google parent Alphabet, which has its own service and has partnered with Uber in some cities.
Shares of Tesla (TSLA) were slightly higher in premarket trading on the news.
