Elon Musk is back to enterprise – and back to sending emails asking employees what they’ve achieved.
On Tuesday afternoon, Musk despatched an e-mail asking all xAI employees to “send a one page summary of what you’ve accomplished in the past four weeks and what you intend to accomplish in the next four weeks.”
“This is due by noon on Thursday,” Musk wrote within the e-mail, in accordance to a replica of the e-mail shared with NCS by a supply acquainted with the scenario. A spokesperson for xAI didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Musk is recognized for making such requests from employees at varied firms and companies he has led all through his profession.
In August 2024, Musk despatched out an e-mail to all workers at X asking for a “one page summary of your contributions to the company over the last month and over the last twelve months” as a method to make “stock & option awards proportionate to the likely future contributions of people at X,” in accordance to a supply who obtained the e-mail. The Verge first reported on the e-mail final 12 months.
While Musk was advising the White House and the Department of Government Efficiencies, all federal employees were sent mass emails asking them to record what they achieved up to now week. Musk introduced on X on the time that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
But the emails had been despatched so broadly, federal employees working in delicate areas comparable to nationwide safety and the judiciary had been warned by company leaders not to reply. In February, the Office of Personnel Management informed companies that responses to Musk’s e-mail had been voluntary and failure to reply didn’t equal resignation. By August, your entire program was completely rolled back by OPM.
When Musk first acquired Twitter in 2022, he at one level asked employees to print out traces of code they’d just lately written, in accordance to Platformer. Then, reversing course, he informed them to shred what that they had printed.
It’s not clear what Musk intends to do with the data xAI employees present. The firm plans to maintain a three-hour all-hands assembly Wednesday, a supply acquainted with the assembly informed NCS. Last week Business Insider reported that xAI laid off a whole bunch of employees on its knowledge annotation staff, together with “AI tutors” who assist prepare the Grok AI chatbot.
Musk’s xAI firm is a relative newcomer into the extremely profitable and fast-growing synthetic intelligence house. It’s behind Grok, the controversial AI chatbot that is additionally built-in into the X social community. Musk has usually publicly commented on adjusting Grok’s responses, particularly once they don’t align together with his worldview. Grok has at instances supplied racist, antisemitic and other problematic responses to queries on X – which the corporate later stated it had mounted. Its picture technology expertise has far fewer restrictions when it comes to grownup content material than these supplied by rivals, together with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Despite the Grok’s controversies, it has some high-profile followers, together with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
“My relationship with Elon is excellent, and our relationship is largely around collaboration and engineering,” Huang informed NCS Wednesday in an interview within the UK. “Elon’s an excellent engineer, and that, I think, is the bottom line. He’s an excellent engineer. He builds excellent things. He wants to build them properly. He has his personality, but don’t confuse that with his technical excellence.”
Huang stated he is a frequent Grok person.
“I use it regularly and use it almost every day,” Huang stated. “I think it’s an excellent model, and I think he has an excellent chance to take a leadership position in AI.”
NCS’s Anna Cooban contributed to this report.