Since Leaving Washington, Elon Musk Has Been All In on His A.I. Company
Mr. Musk spent the summer at his artificial intelligence start-up xAI, trying to match the runaway success of OpenAI. The result was chaos.
In a rare companywide meeting on Wednesday, Elon Musk laid out his vision for xAI, his two-year-old start-up that is chasing its competitors in the race to build artificial intelligence.
Using the lofty language that has typified Mr. Musk’s A.I. dreams for more than a decade, he told employees that he wanted to build systems that were “maximally truth-seeking” while previewing plans to build a Microsoft competitor called Macrohard.
“We are the only company where the mission is truth,” Mr. Musk told his workers as part of an hour-and-a-half presentation that was listened to by The New York Times. “If you force the A.I. to lie or believe things that are not true, you’re at great risk of creating a dystopian future.”
Since his falling out with President Trump in June, Mr. Musk, 54, has redoubled his efforts with xAI, which makes the Grok chatbot and was recently valued at $120 billion. He has deemed government a hopeless problem, but he believes A.I. will revolutionize society. And he insists xAI can build technology that will eventually help his other businesses, like the electric carmaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX.
Over the summer, Mr. Musk spent most of his time at xAI’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif., working in frantic all-day spurts that sometimes stretched into the next day, according to three people with knowledge of the company’s operations who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Occasionally, as he has with his other companies over the years, he has slept at the office.
Mr. Musk’s focus on xAI raises questions about how much time he is spending at his other companies, and comes as Tesla’s board of directors has been pushing to give him a trillion-dollar pay package, which they say will motivate him to improve the car maker’s performance. On Monday, Mr. Musk posted on X, “Daddy is very much home,” and detailed his schedule, which included 12 hours of meetings at Tesla and a visit to xAI’s data center.
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Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].
Ryan Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry.
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