“Our bench strength is outstanding… we actually develop people really well at Tesla and we are still a magnet for talent.”
At xAI, some staff have balked at Musk’s free-speech absolutism and perceived lax approach to user safety as he rushes out new AI features to compete with OpenAI and Google. Over the summer, the Grok chatbot integrated into X praised Adolf Hitler, after Musk ordered changes to make it less “woke.”
Ex-CFO Liberatore was among the executives that clashed with some of Musk’s inner circle over corporate structure and tough financial targets, people with knowledge of the matter said.
“Elon loyalists who exhibit his traits are laying off people and making decisions on safety that I think are very concerning for people internally,” one of the people added. “Mike is a business guy, a capitalist. But he’s also someone who does stuff the right way.”
The Wall Street Journal first reported some of the details of the internal disputes.
Linda Yaccarino, chief executive of X, resigned in July after the social media platform was subsumed by xAI. She had grown frustrated with Musk’s unilateral decision-making and his criticism over advertising revenue.
xAI’s co-founder and chief engineer, Igor Babuschkin, stepped down a month later to found his own AI safety research project.
Communications executives Dave Heinzinger and John Stoll, spent three and nine months at X respectively, before returning to their former employers, according to people familiar with the matter.
X also lost a rash of senior engineers and product staff who reported directly to Musk and were helping to navigate the integration with xAI.
This includes head of product engineering Haofei Wang and consumer product and payments boss Patrick Traughber. Uday Ruddarraju, who oversaw X and xAI’s infrastructure engineering, and infrastructure engineer Michael Dalton were poached by OpenAI.
Musk shows no sign of relenting. xAI’s flirtatious “Ani bot” has caused controversy over sexually explicit interactions with teenage Grok app users. But the company’s owner has installed a hologram of Ani in the lobby of xAI to greet staff.
“He’s the boss, the alpha and anyone who doesn’t treat him that way, he finds a way to delete,” one former top Tesla executive said.
“He does not have shades of grey, is highly calculated, and focused… that makes him hard to work with. But if you’re aligned with the end goal, and you can grin and bear it, it’s fine. A lot of people do.”
Additional reporting by George Hammond.
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