Elon Musk Admits xAI ‘Wasn’t Built Right’—and Is Rebuilding the Company From Scratch

Musk reportedly brought in ‘fixers’ from Tesla and SpaceX to audit xAI.

BY BEN SHERRY, STAFF REPORTER @BENLUCASSHERRY

Elon Musk. Photo: Getty Images

Elon Musk says that xAI “wasn’t built right the first time,” and is now being “rebuilt from the foundations up.” 

Musk made the comment in an X post, in reference to the news that two product and engineering leads at AI coding company Cursor, Jason Ginsberg and Andrew Milich, had joined xAI. According to The Information, the pair joined specifically to help the organization catch up to competitors Anthropic and OpenAI in coding. 

The admission from Musk comes just over a month after SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock deal that valued the AI company at $250 billion. It also follows a string of departures from xAI by employees and senior leaders, including most of the company’s original 12 co-founders. Guodong Zhang, a co-founder who previously led efforts to improve Grok’s coding abilities, posted on March 12 that it was his last day at the company. 

According to the Financial Times, Musk has recently brought in “fixers” from Tesla and SpaceX to audit xAI, and Zhang told colleagues that he was leaving after being relieved of his main duties by Musk. The FT also reported that another co-founder, Zihang Dai, also left the company earlier this week. 

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In a follow-up post today, Musk apologized, saying that “many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview.” He added that he and xAI Talent Engineering head Baris Akis are “going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates.” 

Benjamin DeKraker, a former member of xAI’s human data team who now works on AI-powered training aids for the Naval Welding Institute, quoted Musk’s post and added, “some of us tried to alert you that there were problems, chief.” DeKraker wrote that he suspects “many of the foundational problems at xAI were kept hidden from Elon until very recently.” 

In his own follow-up post, DeKraker said that while working at xAI he was reprimanded by management for asking his followers on X for suggestions regarding how to improve Grok. “I woke up the next day to a threatening email from my main supervisor* at xAI, telling me I had messed up, that I was NEVER to ask for ideas to improve Grok ever again,” DeKraker wrote. He went on to say that management suspended his X account. 

“They filled xAI with middle managers and busybodies,” DeKraker wrote. “It was one of the most DEI and corporate-y places I’ve ever worked. I came in wanting Elon and xAI to win and left just sad.”

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