{"id":9418,"date":"2026-03-13T20:28:05","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T20:28:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/elon-musk-orders-layoffs-xai-coding\/"},"modified":"2026-03-13T20:28:05","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T20:28:05","slug":"elon-musk-orders-layoffs-xai-coding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/elon-musk-orders-layoffs-xai-coding\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk Orders Sweeping Layoffs as xAI Fails to Catch Up"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In a Thursday tweet<\/a>, Elon Musk said he was looking to rebuild his AI startup xAI<\/a> \u201cfrom the foundations up\u201d after admitting it wasn\u2019t \u201cbuilt right first time around.\u201d<\/p>\n

The news comes amid a major exodus of cofounders<\/a>, with a striking majority of them jumping ship over the last year. Amid the resulting leadership vacuum, the Financial Times<\/em> reported<\/a> on Friday that Musk had omitted a key detail in his latest missives on his social media platform. According to the paper\u2019s sources, he\u2019s ordered a round of sweeping layoffs at the company after becoming frustrated with a lack of progress on its AI coding software.<\/p>\n

Many roles are reportedly being scrutinized. Musk reportedly ordered higher-ups from Tesla and SpaceX, the latter of which xAI was folded into earlier this year, to conduct audits and weed out anybody deemed to be underperforming \u2014 likely not what staffers, who were already complaining of burnout,<\/a> wanted to hear.<\/p>\n

The news comes just over a month after Musk announced he had \u201creorganized\u201d xAI<\/a>, admitting that it \u201cunfortunately required parting ways with some people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pressure is on. Following SpaceX and xAI\u2019s merger, the space company is looking to go public at a staggering valuation of $1.25 trillion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But keeping up in the heated AI race is proving far more difficult than Musk may have anticipated, given his decision to rework the entire thing mere months ahead of the biggest stock market listing in history.<\/p>\n

Coding, in particular, has become a major focus, with Musk poaching two senior employees<\/a>\u00a0from AI coding startup Cursor. According to the FT<\/em>, staffers have grown concerned that the training data of xAI\u2019s chatbot Grok was lacking, causing it to lag far behind Anthropic\u2019s popular Claude Code and OpenAI\u2019s Codex.<\/p>\n

\u201cGrok is currently behind in coding,\u201d Musk said at a conference earlier this week, as quoted by Business Insider<\/em><\/a>. \u201cThe reason I was late for this was that I was just in a giant sort of all-hands on coding, going through all the things that need to happen to essentially exceed our competitors on coding, which I think we\u2019ll do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s messaging surrounding the company\u2019s AI product has been opaque. In August, the mercurial CEO announced the company\u2019s latest AI project, \u201cMacrohard,\u201d a tongue-in-cheek jab<\/a> squarely aimed at competitor Microsoft. Musk also said that he was combining Tesla and xAI\u2019s efforts to develop a \u201cdigital Optimus,\u201d a nod to the carmaker\u2019s humanoid robot.<\/p>\n

The man who was leading the \u201cMacrohard\u201d effort, former DeepMind researcher Toby Pohlen, left the company just 16 days<\/a> after being put in charge of the project late last month.<\/p>\n

Where that leaves the future of xAI\u2019s coding tool remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

Apart from being pushed out by Musk, who\u2019s now trying to reboot the company from scratch, inside sources told the paper that people are quitting because they\u2019re burnt out, an unsurprising development given the CEO\u2019s infamously brutal micromanagement style<\/a>. Insiders told the FT<\/em> that the revolving door of talent was destroying morale.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy next priorities: sleep for more than 8h, write down all the things I\u2019ve learnt (I have a list), and then think about what I want to do next,\u201d Pohlen wrote.<\/p>\n

More on xAI:<\/strong> Elon Musk Says He\u2019s Epically Screwed Up at xAI, Is Rebuilding \u201cFrom the Foundations\u201d<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Elon Musk Orders Sweeping Layoffs as xAI Fails to Catch Up<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In a Thursday tweet, Elon Musk said he was looking to rebuild his AI startup xAI \u201cfrom the foundations up\u201d after admitting it wasn\u2019t \u201cbuilt right first time around.\u201d The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,178,3841,3842,3936,187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-elon-musk","category-ethics","category-future-society","category-the-industrialists","category-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}