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Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

• Zigurd 7mo ago
  Obviously catching up to others in agent assisted coding is the motivation for this. But it is also an odd decision in the same way that Meta hiring an AI leader from a data labeling company is odd.
• rvz 7mo ago
  Not even Elon believes that Cursor is worth $50B or even $29B.
  • tibbar 7mo ago
    How can cursor be worth more than a few billion? Claude/Codex are already better autonomous SWE-lite replacements. Cognition surely has a better internal harness. Cursor does have a lot of users, I'll give it that.
    • serial_dev 7mo ago
      Distribution is also important. Cursor is a great normie tool (I’m one of them), with probably more enterprise deals than the competition.
    • ok_dad 7mo ago
      I like Cursor a lot more than Claude Code. It works better for me overall. I like the way they integrate it into the IDE so the agent is my tool rather than a 'partner' or something like that. I'm pretty sad that they lost some engineers, I hope these folks weren't integral to Cursor in any way.
    • SadErn 7mo ago
      [dead]
    • SV_BubbleTime 7mo ago
      Moats are weird right now… but Cursor doesn’t have one at all so I agree it can’t really be worth much.
  • Aurornis 7mo ago
    If key employees are leaving Cursor to join xAI, I would imagine not even Cursor employees are optimistic about the company’s future valuation.
• dang 7mo ago
  I couldn't find a working archive link for the ft.com article - anyone? Since it's the original source I've left it up, but added other URLs to the toptext.
  • natebc 7mo ago
    I sent it to archive.ph here: https://archive.ph/rP4cb https://archive.ph/rP4cb and it has the content but the formatting is atrocious. HTH.
    • dang 7mo ago
      Better than nothing - added above. Thanks!
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• dang 7mo ago
  Recent, related, and apparently ahead of the curve: Ask HN: What Happened to xAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323236 - March 2026 (6 comments)
• awestroke 7mo ago
  @grok is this real? @grok fire the bottom 50% engineers from x.ai ranked by number of commits per day @grok generate a hypothetical picture of an Elon who is not under the influence of large amounts of Ketamine I honestly don't know what to expect from Elon these days. But it's rarely good news.
• bearjaws 7mo ago
  Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project. Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward. I also keep hearing this narrative that Twitter is a good data source, but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset. Sure keeping up with realtime topics can be useful, but I am not sure how much of a product that is.
  • jmspring 7mo ago
    Twitter has the mass adoption, and it takes an effort to avoid bot/particular view bias - but as a valuable content source, it's a far cry from what it once was before Musk took it over.
  • notahacker 7mo ago
    Twitter's communication style being based around brevity, slang, memes, spam and non-threaded conversations seems particularly unlikely to be helpful for optimising LLMs
    • aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
      > Twitter's communication style [...] seems particularly unlikely to be helpful for optimising LLMs This depends on what one wants to optimize the AI for. ;-)
    • tclancy 7mo ago
      >Twitter's communication style being based around brevity Is this still true? Every once in a while someone sends a link around to some madman explaining how race or economics or whatever "really" works and it's like a full dissertation with headings, footnotes, clip art. They're halfway to reinventing Grok-o-pedia right there in Twitter. I mean X. I was promised that "X gonna give it to you" but it turns out "it" is some form of brain chlymidia.
      • 3rodents 7mo ago
        Elon was running some sort of $1m competition for the “best” Twitter post for a few months. I think those type of dissertations about Phrenology and the like have fallen off a cliff since the competition ended.
• xnx 7mo ago
  xAI's biggest contribution to the space seems to have been their x-rated image/video model. Hard to see what xAI has to offer against Gemini, Claud, ChatGPT.
  • wolvoleo 7mo ago
    To be fair I think there's a good usecase there. Someone's gonna do it. People will want it. American financial institutions are too prudish for it but money is money. And personally I think there's nothing morally wrong with it (of course within normal restrictions like 18+, consent of portrayed parties etc) xAI is getting flak in Europe because they don't obey consent and age, not because it's porn. Personally I prefer porn made by real people right now, not just because of quality but because they have character. But I can imagine experiences becoming more interactive that way and that would be nice.
    • chabes 7mo ago
      That consent of portrayed parties is impossible. What is the solution there?
      • trollbridge 7mo ago
        Portray fictional characters?
        • Retr0id 7mo ago
          There are 8 billion humans, any fictional human is going to look almost exactly like at least one real human.
          • trollbridge 7mo ago
            How about obviously fictional portrayals then? Somewhat cartoonish or anime or artistic etc
            • 7mo ago
• heraldgeezer 7mo ago
  I do use Grok as a chatbot sometimes. Very good for sourcing X and general web search. Not as "prude" as the others too.
  • RonanSoleste 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  • LightBug1 7mo ago
    Prude? I've played with all the main AI players for the last 2'ish years. I've never once thought: you know what? that was a bit prudish. Genuinely morbidly curious. What use case do you have where you end up making that conclusion?
    • mikrl 7mo ago
      Making funny memes of my friends mainly. ChatGPT won’t touch that, I haven’t tried with Claude yet, but grok keeps the group chat flush with laughing emojis. That’s all I use it for really- things out of alignment with the other platforms- which IMO are better on every other metric (except having a sense of humour of course)
      • BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
        I love my friends enough that the memes I make for them are hand-crafted.
        • mikrl 7mo ago
          Hey I’m all grown up now, just don’t have the time to meticulously touch pixels in MS Paint like back in the day
      • LightBug1 7mo ago
        Perhaps the lesson here is upgrade your use case for AI's! All that power and that's your stumbling block? LOL, no disrespect. Sure, I have no problem with what you're doing, and as things evolve I'm sure there'll be no problem, but there's countless other apps designed to do exactly what you've said.
• fraywing 7mo ago
  Grok's UVP is still nonconsensual porn, right?
  • seaal 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • knowsuchagency 7mo ago
      Dang asked us to keep it civil. We should respond with the same amount of class, forethought, and decorum as Elon.
      • solid_fuel 7mo ago
        I thought it was a civil comment, and frankly he's treating Elon better than Elon treats his own daughter.
        • snackerblues 7mo ago
          [flagged]
• mikkupikku 7mo ago
  Maybe they shouldn't have spent so much time trying to make their model have an edgy cringe attitude, Idk.
• dang 7mo ago
  [stub for generic-indignant tangents - not what this site is for - please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html]
  • chairmanwow1 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • KennyBlanken 7mo ago
      So you deeply admire a man who threw a temper-tantrum when his giant box designed by a bunch of people with no experience in anything underwater or rescue, much less underwater rescue - and was deemed unusable to rescue people from an underwater cave with passages so small divers had to remove their gear and push it ahead of them? And repeatedly, directly, said the lead rescuer was a pedophile? You deeply admire a man so unable to restrain his ego and temper that much of his production team at Tesla quit, some right to his face, because they couldn't meet his nearly impossible goal of extreme levels of automation on the Model 3 production line? Which, if all else is ignored, cost Tesla billions in delays because of his demands? You deeply admire a many who is vehemently racist and misogynistic? You deeply admire a man who latches onto just about any conspiracy theory? You deeply admire a man who is so desperate for attention he unblocks himself from Twitter users' accounts? You deeply admire a man whose companies were under investigation by nearly every federal enforcement agency there is? You deeply admire a man who has failed to meet the vast majority of his own publicly stated benchmarks? And who engages in PT Barnum levels of bullshit, like having "AI robots" that are actually just robots piloted by unemployed actors? The man is a pathological liar who has failed upward not because of some sort of unique talent or skill, but because he's extremely abusive and willing to break any regulation or law he sees as inconvenient.
      • chairmanwow1 7mo ago
        Yes
  • epolanski 7mo ago
• dang 7mo ago
  All: please stick to thoughtful, substantive discussion. You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. If you don't have a thoughtful, substantive comment to add, not commenting is also a good option. There are quite a few interesting submissions to talk about. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• SadErn 7mo ago
  [dead]
• measurablefunc 7mo ago
  It's surprising that AI coding agents have network effects but it's true. Think about it from first principles & you'll realize that the bottleneck is how many people are using it to write real code & providing both implicit (compiler errors, test failures, crash logs, etc) & direct ("did not properly follow instructions", "deleted main databases", "didn't properly use a tool", etc) feedback. No one is using xAI for serious software engineering so that leaves OpenAI, Anthropic, & Google w/ enough scale to benefit from network effects. No one has real AI but what they do have is the appearance of intelligence from crowdsourced feedback & filtering. This means companies that are already in the lead will continue to stay there & xAI started way too late so they will continue to lose in every domain that actually matters & benefits from network effects.
  • trollbridge 7mo ago
    Is there really a network effect, though? What’s the moat?
    • measurablefunc 7mo ago
      If you are using an AI w/ 100 users who are writing throwaway software vs someone who is using AI w/ 1000 users who are writing software w/ formal specifications then guess which AI is going to win? The answer is plainly obvious to me but might not be to those who haven't thought about how current AIs actually work.
      • trollbridge 7mo ago
        Now swap those usage numbers.
        • measurablefunc 7mo ago
          That's what it means to benefit from network effects. The company with the most number of users always has an advantage that other companies with fewer users can not circumvent with technical virtuosity.
• lvl155 7mo ago
  xAI showed me that it’s really still OAI and Anthropic (which is basically the OG devs). No matter how much money you throw at the problem, the entire space is still in the hands of a few.
• stainablesteel 7mo ago
  im not surprised, grok definitely falls behind as both a coding agent and a research tool. claude codes the best, gpt is the best research tool, and grok is really only great at videos. which isn't a huge loss, but videos don't have the same functional capacity as academic topics and coding
  • alephnerd 7mo ago
    > grok is really only great at videos. which isn't a huge loss, but videos don't have the same functional capacity as academic topics and coding With the right product leadership, this could actually be a killer app usecase for the entertainment industry as well as human-AI user interface - most people find text and typing to be a counterintuitive user experience (especially those whose day job isn't directly touching code or Excel). Additionally, CodeGen as a segment is significantly oversaturated at this point, and in a lot of cases an organization has the ability to armtwist a 4th party data retention guarantee from Anthropic or OpenAI to train their own CodeGen tools (ik one F50 that is not traditionally viewed as a tech company going this route). That said, Musk has a reputation of internally overriding experienced product leaders with a track record. It's a shame because Grok and xAI had potential, and it wouldn't hurt to have another semi-competitive foundation model player in the US from a redundancy and ecosystem perspective.
• numbers_guy 7mo ago
  Unfortunate. The Grok team built a phenomenal model. I use it all the time and it very often out performs GPT and Claude, on coding and STEM research related tasks. I was part of the beta for a while Grok 4.2 Beta with multi-agents and it was just amazingly good. People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities. I mean, I don't think my boss would approve a paid Grok subscription for example.
  • lvl155 7mo ago
    My experience was quite different. It was on par with open source models from China (and it was priced as much) and could never replace Sonnet/Opus/GPT5.x.
  • ryandrake 7mo ago
    > People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities. This is a fact of life, though. "Who created it" is a valid and common reason to rule out using a particular product, even one with objectively good quality.
  • distances 7mo ago
    > People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities. This is very true. I have no idea how it performs, as I wouldn't use it even if I was paid for that. Wouldn't matter if it was the best model available, in my view the name is so thoroughly tainted by now that you would get a reputational hit just by admitting to use it.
  • thinkcontext 7mo ago
    Yes, the white genocide and mechahitler episodes have suppressed adoption.
  • virgildotcodes 7mo ago
    Have you tried the 5.3 Codex Xhigh, 5.4 Xhigh, Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1? All of them (even Gemini, the worst of the bunch) far outclass Grok on everything I've thrown at them, especially coding. Grok is good at summarizing what's happening on twitter though.
  • 7mo ago
• pelorat 7mo ago
  This is veiled speak for "No one wants to work for us, so we need to contact rejected applicants to fill positions". I use AI for work, but not agentic, at most per method/function using GitHub CoPilot (which has Grok on it). Grok is at best useful for commenting code.
• blueaquilae 7mo ago
  Yes 11 up and everyone why free insult on a model that top adoption. Aligned with your personal view is not ahead of the curve, it's just personal.
• BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
  I feel like even just a couple years ago it would have been shocking to see an article involving Musk have this kind of spin. Like you'd never see a line like this: > The name is a “funny” reference to Microsoft, the billionaire added. in something from 2023 or earlier.
• beezlewax 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• teladnb 7mo ago
  It does not surprise me. The free Grok got worse since 4.0, they increasingly save money by not responding at all or only allowing one answer. Grok now defends the administration and billionaires. The company seems to burn money like crazy. Everyone knows that "AI in space" and the downgrade to a moon trip after claiming for 15 years that Mars is just around the corner are marketing. All AIs are toys and the coding promises are just a lie to string along investors. Unfortunately many of these are senile Star Trek watchers who buy into everything.
• Imnimo 7mo ago
  I think the problem for xAI is that it can really only hire two types of researchers - people who are philosophically aligned with Elon, and people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment). But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent who have strong philosophical motivation for their work, and those philosophies are often completely at odds with Elon. OpenAI and Anthropic have philosophical niches that are much better at attracting the current cream of the crop, and I don't really see how xAI can compete with that.
  • PunchTornado 7mo ago
    Sorry, but what is the philosophical niche of openai really? Obtain money at all cost? No red lined when using your modele in war? Work for scam altman?
  • zeroCalories 7mo ago
    It's worse than that. Elon is a notoriously bad employer, and the only people that put up with him were the people that shared his vision. Pretty much the only people that will work for him now are second rate researchers and people that think gooner AI and racism is a worthwhile mission.
    • LZ_Khan 7mo ago
      After seeing the type of people he hired for doge.. yikes.
      • GeorgeTirebiter 7mo ago
        Karparthy worked for Elon for, what, 5 years? How did he do it, if Elon is Ivan the Terrible?
        • jazzpush2 7mo ago
          Karpathy makes great educational content. It's not clear what industry (or academic) research he did even now, five years later.
• Sol- 7mo ago
  I don't use it myself, but I feel like the way Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants. I think it's good that people tag @grok if they don't understand something or want an opinion, even if it looks pretty silly to see "@grok is this true" repeated multiple times in replies. That said, Musk's attempts at misaligning the thing and make it prefer his opinions of course destroy any trust. It's surprising that it's seemingly as good and helpful as it is despite the corruption attempts. I also don't quite get how the business model is supposed to work out if its main usecase is to serve Twitter. I know they provide API access as all other models, but with how distrusted Musk is and how sensitive of a topic reliable model behavior is, they seem to sabotage themselves. Which company wants it to go mechahitler on them?
  • daveguy 7mo ago
    Grok is a bot that: 1) sometimes goes mechahitler 2) was trained to be biased against empathy and understanding (because woke). 3) is customized to spout Elon's opinions as fact. Claiming it is "objective and rational" seems like a misjudgement to me. If it really is more objective and rational than the average xitter poster, that says more about that platform than it does about Grok.
    • Sol- 7mo ago
      I guess I was mostly arguing that the integration of something like Grok into Twitter was definitely a net positive for online discussion, as anyone has a fact checker and explainer at hand now to diffuse irrational online arguments. Also I think you overrate Musk's success in fiddling with the model. As I have written, I also don't like his attempts to tune it to his tastes, but if you see the outputs that people get from Grok, it seems mostly fine except in the specific scenarios that Musk seems to have focused their misalignment on. Of course something like Claude being integrated into Twitter would likely be better.
      • daveguy 7mo ago
        He doesn't have to fiddle with the model because he gets to inject his own opinion into the context MitM style. But I get what you're saying now, a fact checker available to query during an online discussion would be helpful. Assuming the checkerbot was actually independent/neutral and backed responses with sources. Definitely not assumptions you can make with grok.
• tmaly 7mo ago
  I think it would have been better to have just brought Ashok Elluswamy over and placed him in charge of a group and then tried to just keep the researchers on rather than firing them. It is hard to get anything done if you do not have the talent already onboard.
• catapart 7mo ago
  lol! no surer sign of a junior/naive/ignorant developer or manager than the sentiment "okay, well, let's start from scratch and do it right this time." big projects generate cruft. there are ways to minimize it, but as you go along there will always be some stuff that doesn't quite mesh with whatever else you've got going on. if you insist on ironing out every single wrinkle (admirable!) you'll never actually deliver a result. I'm not saying this will fail. green field projects can certainly be a godsend when they produce something better than what they attempt to replace. but they are always a sign of failure. of not being able to work your way out of the mess you made with the first attempt. so that just begs the question: what are you going to do when this attempt gets hard to work with? going to give up and start over again - do it right that time? or...?
  • ajam1507 7mo ago
    This is far too general of a philosophy to be applied in the dark. You can't say, without any familiarity with what the actual software looks like whether a rewrite is the best way to proceed. There are plenty of projects that get bogged down in the inertia of a system that wasn't built right in the first place. Also, modern AI is only a few years old at this point. Whatever has been built so far is hardly load bearing.
• Marazan 7mo ago
  Wow, bit weird that Musk, who must have known about how badly xAI was doing, spent so much of his investors money buying out xAI. What an enormous blunder.
  • XorNot 7mo ago
    It's how he hides losses though. People who aren't Musk can demand answers to questions he'd like to ignore. As it is within the Musk empire, xAI is used to hold up X, Tesla is holding up xAI. And all of that debt is being slowly shuffled to SpaceX.
    • vessenes 7mo ago
      SX investor here: the combined value of SX is well up on the private secondary market post-acquisition. It was value accretive, in very real dollar terms.
      • tehlike 7mo ago
        What sort of liquidity is there? The other question I have is Elon is looking into nasdaq listing with passive funds buying from get go to keep the buying pressure on a low float. Any risk that's not seen?
        • vessenes 7mo ago
          For reference, I've been asked in the last month for a $500mm chunk of stock to a single buyer at or (slightly) above the combination price. At that price, there is no liquidity - it's below ask.
          • tehlike 7mo ago
            Thank you. I recently saw a bunch of (mostly) engineers join just before ipo, and at 1.7T valuation it makes you really think how much market will take it. I never bet against Elon, and admire a lot about him, so not certainly a dig against him, just seeing what happened to figma (combined with software + ai down market) makes me really curious Otherwise, it's an amazing chance to work directly with Elon for sure
• nemothekid 7mo ago
  While I believe Grok was a decent model (in some of our internal use cases it performed the best until Gemini 2.5-pro came out), I can't help lament how the team chose to run. xAI (and Twitter) was the loudest about six-hour workdays, sleeping in the office, and always shipping. ~2 years later it feels like they have nothing to show for it. I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day, with half of that being spent at the Google cafeteria and they dusted xAI years ago.
  • charlierguo 7mo ago
    > I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day Why are you sure of that? Anecdotally everyone I know in and around Google Deepmind works incredibly hard.
    • Analemma_ 7mo ago
      There’s a longstanding meme that Google is full of rest-and-vesters. Maybe it’s true in some departments, but I also have anecdotes that in GDM and other AI-related stuff, people are acutely aware of the existential threat of losing to OpenAI and have the appropriate amount of hustle.
      • leoh 7mo ago
        It really doesn't feel like that and hasn't for years
    • nemothekid 7mo ago
      No disrespect to the Google Deepmind team, but I meant it as a meme. I do not believe most Google employees work 2 hours a day. The Google Deepminds are incredibly smart - I just find it important to point out that the xAI guys spent a year assured they would beat Google because they slept in tents that they made in the office.
  • basisword 7mo ago
    It's almost like burning people out is a bad idea. Fair enough if you're working 12 hour days as employee 1 at a startup but when your boss has more money than God and is working you like a dog you're not going to keep that up (especially when all of those people probably have much better opportunities available to them at the drop of a hat).
• repple 7mo ago
  Their goal of moving compute to space combined with their capacity to launch tons of payload will make this look like a tiny blip.
  • Marazan 7mo ago
    What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?
    • layer8 7mo ago
      That xAI fails faster, hopefully.
    • kybernetikos 7mo ago
      It's hard for an uprising of poor people to shut it off. It's the ideal place to run your CEO / President simulations. I say this tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, I can't really think of any other benefit, and I no longer have a lot of faith in the good sense of some of the people involved.
      • vessenes 7mo ago
        Elon makes a relatively good case in the Dwarkesh podcast. I recall it like this: 1) Energy infra is going to be seriously limited on the production side well, well below demand 2) energy engineering solar for space requires less materials than for gravity-based solar (!) 3) you cut out distribution network needs when you just launch stuff all per-pod in space 4) SpaceX thinks it can create a scalable vertically integrated production facility to turn raw materials into space datacenter pods, with the exception of chips. As a business bet, this is predicated on 10,000x inference demand growth - if we have that, and SpaceX can get the integrated production rolling, and get Starship launching, then these will be actively utilized at scale. Whether you are bullish on the whole plan should, I think come down to your take on those priors: 10kx growth, ability to manage supply chain and production, Starship outlook, and silicon access. I'm not bearish on this after listening to the podcast; it has a very Elon-like returns distribution - if they're wrong on a lot of this, they'll probably have some moderately price-competitive datacenter facilities in space and a lot of built organizational knowhow while Brooklyn journalists dunk on them for spending all that effort to just replicate what we have on Earth. If they're right about most of this, they'll have an unreplicable head start, both due to years of experience, and due to the cheap launch they gambled on ten years ago, they'll have a nearly insurmountable moat.
• twodave 7mo ago
  Used Grok for the first time, in a Tesla, and for that purpose it actually made a lot of sense. It’s very well-integrated into the car’s systems and communication style while driving tends to be very tweet-esque. I think this is the niche they should lean into more (live assistant, e.g. Jarvis type stuff) and leave the more agentic niche to folks like Anthropic. Maybe even delegate more difficult or background tasks to those sorts of models. As a verbal interface I found it pretty pleasant.
  • SaltyBackendGuy 7mo ago
    I am honestly a bit disappointed it couldn't do basic things, like play X on Spotify. To be fair, I accidentally activated Grok for holding the voice command button too long (which is another UX issue - i.e. 2 voice command interfaces).
    • MetaWhirledPeas 7mo ago
      It'll get there. Initial implementation was just talk to Grok. Now it has improved to allow adjustments to navigation routes.
      • deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      • tombert 7mo ago
        I mean, even Google Home and Alexa could handle playing a song on Spotify by me asking for it a decade ago. It's baffling that wasn't one of the first things implemented in Grok for Tesla.
        • MetaWhirledPeas 7mo ago
          The built-in assistant already does a great job of this, so whatever they do with Grok they'll want it to be better in some way. Like, "help me find songs similar to..." or "help me find that one song by that one guy with these lyrics".
• gkfasdfasdf 7mo ago
  The grok button on twitter is pretty awesome. Instantly summarize / explain any tweet, even memes, including replies. Ask follow up questions. Not sure many people know it's there. Also grok in the Tesla is fun, get answers to questions without looking at a phone. I once had it search up a blog post and read it out to me while driving. The NSFW mode is pretty...disgusting so I leave that off. I hope they find a way with Optimus or something. FSD is incredible. More competition is a good thing.
• LZ_Khan 7mo ago
  How come all the departed researchers are Chinese nationals?
  • throwaway5752 7mo ago
    I don't know. Elon Musk personally founded xAI and these were his hand selected cofounders.
    • abraxas 7mo ago
      Because xAI = Jian-Yang x N. I'm kidding... I think.
  • syntaxing 7mo ago
    This is simply not true. Igor Babuschkin and Christian Szegedy left as well. Only 10 of the 12 remain at this point.
• Animats 7mo ago
  “Orbital space centres and mass drivers on the Moon will be incredible.” - Musk Right. The product is the stock. TSLA: [1] Up by 3x in the last two years, despite no new models, the Cybertruck failure, the Robotaxi failure, the large truck failure, and an overall decline in sales. How does he do it? It's a concern seeing Space-X, which builds good rockets, drawn into the X and AI money drains. Space-X is needed. If X and X/AI tanked, nobody would care. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/TSLA https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/TSLA
  • sroussey 7mo ago
    You had the answer right there… SPCX will be the product, what they make will no longer matter.
  • thinkcontext 7mo ago
    If I was a SpaceX investor I'd be considering litigation. Saying the core product has to be rebuilt right after it gets bought by SpaceX?! Maybe the SpaceX investors would have liked some diligence about that before purchase but looks like someone had a conflict of interest about that.
    • Animats 7mo ago
      Space-X and x/AI are both privately held. But this may mess up the proposed IPO.[1] By completing the SpaceX–xAI deal while both companies remain privately held, and now closed, Musk can effectively set relative valuations, negotiate terms within a founder‑controlled ecosystem, close, and then inform investors, without the procedural drag and disclosure obligations that attend a public‑company merger. That flexibility can reduce near‑term execution friction. It does not, however, eliminate fiduciary exposure; rather, it may defer scrutiny to the IPO phase, when investors and regulators will examine how and why the combination occurred, how it was priced, and how related‑party dynamics were managed. [1] https://www.dandodiary.com/2026/03/articles/director-and-officer-liability/the-spacex-xai-merger/ https://www.dandodiary.com/2026/03/articles/director-and-off...
      • robbies 7mo ago
• moogly 7mo ago
  I feel xAI is just a very big version of the Boring Co. "flamethrower": an unserious endeavor which is just a reskinned existing tool (it was a reskinned weed burner), but people were wowed by it anyway, since Musk was behind it, and they all pretended it was something new and notable. The burning (heh) question is which SpaceX subsidiary will fail first, xAI or Tesla (not yet a subsidiary, but it's written in the stars (heh))? Then again SpaceX is also jumping the shark what with their orbital data centers (remember those?). Might be time to start a new Musk company soon.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago
    "Might be time to start a new Musk company soon." This made me laugh How mamy times have we seen HN comments something like, "He started/runs [number] companies..." therefore he is a genius
  • softwaredoug 7mo ago
    Crazy thing is if Hormuz stays closed, Tesla could theoretically be positioned to reap massive benefits. But they seem to be moving away from consumer electric cars as their focus.
    • LtWorf 7mo ago
      With rolling blackouts and rationed fuel?
• hermanzegerman 7mo ago
  The Takeover by SpaceX was obviously a Bailout. And now they pressure NASDAQ to change the rules so they can dump their junk into the index funds.
  • robbies 7mo ago
    100% this, it's fucking insane
• g947o 7mo ago
  > Recruiters have been contacting unsuccessful candidates from previous interviews and assessments to offer them jobs, often on better financial terms, the people said. I'm not sure those candidates would want to work for xAI after seeing the news and everything unless they desperately need a job right now. It's not hard to imagine getting laid off or fired weeks if not days after joining the company.
• breve 7mo ago
  > "AI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up" So Tesla's recent $2 billion investment in xAI was a bad deal? It looks a lot like a public company is being used to bail out a private one.
  • tombert 7mo ago
    I'm pretty sure that all these acquisitions have been glorified accounting tricks in order to undo the damage that Musk did when he bought Twitter at an obscenely overvalued price in 2022. Clearly he didn't actually want Twitter at that price, because he tried to back out almost immediately after making the offer, so now he has his accountants do all this glorified money-shifting to effectively "sanitize" his purchase and recover his funds.
• antonvs 7mo ago
  dang wrote: > You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. This is like telling a country that’s being invaded that they can only respond with strongly worded letters when their enemy is dropping tactical nukes on them. But hey, Paul Graham and cronies benefit from the status quo as much as any other billionaire, so let’s not rock the boat, right? The word “complicit” comes to mind.
  • dang 7mo ago
    It's nothing like that. We're just trying to have an internet forum that manages to stay slightly more interesting than internet mean. Or, if you like, that doesn't burn itself to a crisp and turn into scorched earth. It is rather a modest goal. I think there is a place for such a website, and I believe most HN readers do too.
    • itomato 7mo ago
      It's something that many readers feel should be burned to a crisp. Let it be.
      • dang 7mo ago
        People love to say such things, but actual behaviors are more complex than that.
• quater321 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• zzleeper 7mo ago
  Wait, what does this imply for Cursor? I DGAF about xAI and will never use their Grok, but I did like Cursor more than the alternatives (even if I'm just running opus 4.6 most of the time). But now he is poaching the two heads of engineering of a company that's trying to move very quickly, how is that going to affect their speed and success?
• sergiotapia 7mo ago
  Will this be an indictment on the insane work hours I've heard the xai team pulls?
• holoduke 7mo ago
  Where is the grok coding cli?
• nateburke 7mo ago
  It feels like xAI is perpetually playing catch-up. They haven't quite committed enough to a novel direction relative to anthropic or OAI, what's described in the OP seems symptomatic of a lack of differentiation. If you spend all your time judging yourself relative to the incumbents, there will be no time left over to innovate. The leash is too tight!
  • grim_io 7mo ago
    For a brief moment, they were the top performers in benchmarks with the release of Grok 4. Then they suddenly fired tons of people. Elon does not understand the market and the competition. You can't run a frontier AI lab like any old VC slop company.
• localghost3000 7mo ago
  Musk sounds like such a nightmare to work for. I legitimately don't understand why anyone would put up with him. What's the appeal?
  • pstuart 7mo ago
    He has followers -- takes all kinds, eh? That said, I'm going to guess that some feel like it's the best choice they have -- the devil they know.
  • CamperBob2 7mo ago
    (Shrug) He built some awesome companies that did some awesome things. That inspired people, especially at a time when most job opportunities in tech seemed to revolve around selling ads. Then he went off the deep end, seemingly around the time when the guy in Thailand insulted his submarine idea. It became clear that he can control trillion-dollar companies but not himself. And, well, life's too short to spend it working for Nazis, nutcases, or both.
  • bpodgursky 7mo ago
    He has made lots of the people who work for him very very very very rich.
  • ActorNightly 7mo ago
    Here is a test - go find a current Trump supporter IRL and let him know what you think about him. I bet you will feel like an asshole, especially in a social setting for being cringe as fuck. At the end of the day, most people have internal thoughts about stuff, and some post those thoughts on the internet, but in the real world, they subconsciously still believe that none of this stuff really matters. Its the same for a lot of people that work for Tesla/Space X and so on. The appeal of being part of that, working on novel stuff, is a lot more present than any morality associated with something that most people are disconnected with on a day to day level. This is why all the hate at the current administration and people like Musk is very misdirected. Until we can turn that hate inward and start truly hating each other and standing up for morals with more than just words, the cycle is going to repeat until we either all become mindless wage slaves or some man made apocalypse happens.
• TheAceOfHearts 7mo ago
  I've been saying this for a while, but if I had to use Grok for anything programming-related I'd feel very sad and unproductive. I was playing around with a local TTS model codebase but having some issues getting it to work, so I tried explaining the problem to all the major models to see how they performed. Grok performed the worst by a significant margin, and the worst part was that it easily became stuck trying minor changes that didn't solve the key problem. If we are to take any claims of Recursive Self Improvement seriously at all, then having a competent coding model seems like a key asset where you need to guarantee that you're remaining competitive. Why wouldn't you make coding models a top priority if you expect it to ultimately help your internal teams become more productive and effective? There's also not an unlimited supply of researchers and engineers for them to keep burning through people at the rate at which they've been working. Although I guess for people with short timelines it makes sense to sprint hard, while people with longer timelines are more likely to treat this as a marathon. Maybe the years of burning bridges and developing such a toxic reputation are finally catching up to Elon. I think part of the harm that Elon has done is framing all the work in xAI as engineering while being highly dismissive of research, but a lot of research requires running experiments or thinking about problems and exploring them for long periods of time. If you're just grinding out work nonstop you don't really have time to let your mind wander and explore new ideas. Honestly, I'm surprised they've done such a terrible job with programming. I remember around summer last year it was quite apparent how far behind they were with coding tools, but Elon was posting about taking that domain a bit more seriously. Why didn't any of those efforts materialize into real outputs? Something must be truly dysfunctional inside of xAI for them not to be shipping anything at all, especially considering Elon's propensity to ship undercooked products while continuing to iterate on them, as he has done in many previous cases. I've noticed that Elon has also gone very hard on social media posting a ton of criticisms against the other big AI company CEOs like Daario Amodei. This suggests to me that he must feel very threatened, otherwise he wouldn't be resorting to such childish behavior. He must feel incredibly frustrated that no amount of money is able to make him more competitive within the AI space.
• anigbrowl 7mo ago
  This might explain why Grok went unavailable to non-subscribers at X the other day.
• causalzap 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • serioussecurity 7mo ago
    Only from disingenuous folks trying to control them.
• maplethorpe 7mo ago
  > Toby Pohlen, a former DeepMind researcher, was put in charge of the “Macrohard” project to build digital agents that Musk said could replicate entire software companies. Musk said it was the “most important” drive at the company. The name is a “funny” reference to Microsoft, the billionaire added. Pohlen left 16 days later. When I was 9 years old, my uncle asked me what I was going to do for work when I got older. I told him I was going to start a company called "MacroHard", and become the richest man alive. He told me that's not how the world works. Turns out it is.
  • pas 7mo ago
    Turns out it works a bit like that, yes - especially if you are the loudest chest-beating hominid with the largest pile of fruits, - but mostly not really.
• sidcool 7mo ago
  The pleasure people get at seeing Elon's companies failing is astounding.
  • mintplant 7mo ago
    I'm trans. This man has actively and intentionally made life harder for myself and my loved ones. So yes, I'm going to enjoy any news that weakens his ability to do that, and no, I won't apologize for it.
    • lockjog 7mo ago
      [flagged]
  • yoavm 7mo ago
    Is it really that surprising? He worked very hard at insulting gay, democrats, Trump supporters, Europeans, Jews, trans... you name it. He also contributed to turning the all political disagreements personal by endlessly making ad hominem attacks. You can't attack the whole world personally and then wonder why they're happy to see you losing power.
  • jaimex2 7mo ago
    Which is all media driven mostly and a fantasy. His companies bring in billions and boost each other up. None can be called company in decline, quite the contrary.
  • small_model 7mo ago
    Yes, I used to love hacker news but seeing every Trump/Elon related post brigaded by bots/haters/far left loons is disturbing, may as well just use Reddit.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
• gigatexal 7mo ago
  Ali think all of Elon’s companies have an Elon problem: he’s so polarizing he’s limiting the talent pool to choose from. I’m here for it because I don’t care for the man and want him to fail… but yeah that seems clear to me that his polarizing antics are costing his companies.
• gigatexal 7mo ago
  Maybe SpaceX will buy xAI and Tesla to hide the systemic problems at his companies into the warm embrace of the one legit useful company.
  • tehlike 7mo ago
    Spacex did buy xai.
    • gigatexal 7mo ago
      Right. I forgot about that. Maybe Tesla is next.
• 3327 7mo ago
  [dead]
• pmdr 7mo ago
  MechaHitler and undressing aside, Grok is the best integration of AI into an existing website ever attempted.
  • tehlike 7mo ago
    I agree. I really like seeing on x grok summoned and learning things right there.
• tim-tday 7mo ago
  There should be a social theory study of jerks and people who continue to work for them. I’d imagine there’s a sort of logarithmic drop off. It takes time for the knowledge of terrible bosses to work through the labor force, but tech is a small community (of hopefully smart people) and people start to catch on. A story I heard from a Tesla employee was that it’s impossible to hire because musk is mercurial and every time a hire makes it through the pipeline a hiring freeze cancels all offers. Another story that employees were told to avoid his desk because he randomly fires people. Another that he regularly cancels bonuses because he’s feeling petulant. I heard another story that he threw up Nazi salutes on an internationally televised event. No wait, that one I watched happen. After a while smart people will simply decline to work for him no matter the compensation. Not everyone, but enough to start to matter.
  • bwfan123 7mo ago
    > After a while smart people will simply decline to work for him no matter the compensation. Not everyone, but enough to start to matter. Among people there are 2 types: 1) Those that gain self-esteem by associating themselves with leader-like figures who project visions of the future. This explains cults, religious and political groups and the like. This comes from our ape-dna where the alphas are blindly worshipped. 2) Those with enough cognitive development and independent thinking who can avoid their ape-brain getting short-circuited into worshipping the alphas. Majority of people are in group 1) and my hypothesis is that they form a vast-majority of the customer and employee base of musk cos.
• bmitc 7mo ago
  Did everyone forget that xAI was just a way for Musk to weasle his way out of debt from his Twitter purchase?
  • bdangubic 7mo ago
    His Twitter purchase bought him the Presidency and Congress and Senate - arguably the greatest purchase in this history of mankind
    • Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
      Quality needs controlling.
    • SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
      The level of influence his purchase had on the actual outcome of the election is debatable. I'm skeptical it mattered much at all. Twitter is just less important than people think. Trump, at worst, had about a 50/50 shot to win in any case. Elon spent a couple hundred million on get-out-the-vote operations in swing states, which made him the single biggest donor supporting Trump by far and I think that's what really ingratiated him enough with Trump to head up DOGE, and for < 1% the price of Twitter. And FWIW, Elon has tried to influence other races with his megaphone and money (like a WI supreme court race) and totally failed.
• autodate 7mo ago
  [dead]
• thebigspacefuck 7mo ago
  Grok 4.20-beta1 scores above GPT-5.4-high and just behind Opus 4.6 on LMArena for Text https://arena.ai/leaderboard https://arena.ai/leaderboard I guess for coding if you’re not first you’re last, but this is damn impressive considering. It looked like they pulled the coding model from the benchmarks, but it was similar.
  • grim_io 7mo ago
    Accroding to https://artificialanalysis.ai https://artificialanalysis.ai, it's around Gemini Flash 3, or some of the Chinese open weight models, like GLM 5. For all the money burned, I am not impressed. Why would I use Mecha Hitler for almost double the cost of Gemini Flash 3?
• amai 7mo ago
  Nobody wants a biased AI like xAI. If I want a biased opinion, I can just ask my neighbor. A good AI feels like the collective knowledge of humanity at my fingertips, not the random ramblings of a lonely old man.
• nailer 7mo ago
  [flagged]