SpaceXAI Loses Dozens of Staff After SpaceX Merger as Musk Pushes Grok to Match Claude
Updated
Updated · Bloomberg · Jul 17
SpaceXAI Loses Dozens of Staff After SpaceX Merger as Musk Pushes Grok to Match Claude
1 articles · Updated · Bloomberg · Jul 17
Summary
Dozens of xAI employees — including several co-founders — left after Elon Musk folded the startup into SpaceX and renamed it SpaceXAI, according to people familiar with the company.
Michael Nicolls, installed this spring to run the AI unit, told staff the near-term goal was to make Grok "maximally useful" and catch up with Anthropic's Claude on chatbot and coding tasks.
Internal documents and interviews with about a dozen people described daily operations as chaotic, with projects and Slack channels explicitly organized around matching Claude's performance.
The merger was meant to give the struggling AI business more resources and help the broader company appeal to Wall Street investors, but it instead deepened an identity crisis inside SpaceXAI.