{"id":45144,"date":"2026-05-20T08:21:19","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T08:21:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/45144\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T08:21:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T08:21:19","slug":"elon-musk-taps-loyalists-at-xai-before-spacex-ipo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/45144\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk Taps Loyalists at xAI Before SpaceX IPO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk<\/a> has long viewed artificial intelligence as critical to his sprawling business empire. Now, he\u2019s increasingly relying on allies from across his other companies as he scrambles to rebuild his AI firm, xAI<\/a>, after slipping behind rivals.<\/p>\n

The world\u2019s richest man has redeployed trusted lieutenants from Starlink and Tesla<\/a> to oversee some xAI projects, according to a copy of xAI\u2019s organizational structure viewed by Bloomberg News. Musk has also tapped friends and advisers from the world of venture capital. These close associates are among the dozen-plus top Musk lieutenants at xAI, spanning engineering, product and finance.<\/p>\n

The org chart, which changes often and has not previously been reported, highlights xAI\u2019s vital importance to Musk and signals his frenzied efforts to gain a leadership position in AI by drawing on executives from his other successful ventures. The stakes are high to revive its fortunes: Musk folded xAI into SpaceX<\/a> earlier this year, making it a key part of the pitch for what promises to be the largest public offering<\/a> in history.<\/p>\n

When Musk merged SpaceX and xAI<\/a> in February, creating a $1.25 trillion private behemoth, he did so with the idea that xAI would serve as a technological complement to the rocket company\u2019s ambitious and futuristic projects. Musk has talked openly about using SpaceX to put data centers into space<\/a>, which would be used to help power xAI\u2019s models and generative AI features.<\/p>\n

But xAI\u2019s business has been burning through cash<\/a>, Bloomberg News has reported, making it a potential liability for Musk\u2019s SpaceX IPO. XAI has also struggled to gain momentum with corporate clients. And dozens of employees, including most of Musk\u2019s co-founders at xAI, have departed the company since the start of the year. <\/p>\n

Representatives for xAI and SpaceX did not reply to requests for comment. The executives, leaders and engineering team members identified similarly didn\u2019t reply to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

Musk is now racing to rebuild xAI’s ranks, shuffling staff between his various businesses as he\u2019s done before<\/a>. Since 2015, for example, Tesla and SpaceX have shared a vice president of materials engineering, Charles Kuehmann. Antonio Gracias<\/a>, a SpaceX board member and former Tesla director, has invested in xAI through his venture firm. And Jared Birchall<\/a>, Musk\u2019s money manager, has been listed as<\/a> an executive at Neuralink<\/a> while fundraising for SpaceX. <\/p>\n

Birchall is among the Musk insiders now deeply involved with xAI\u2019s management. Others include Michael Nicolls, a longtime Starlink executive who took over as xAI\u2019s president in April, and Ashok Elluswamy<\/a>, a Tesla engineer who has been working with the xAI team as part of a combined project called Macrohard<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Musk has also tapped others in his orbit who he became closer to as part of his push to slash government spending<\/a> at the Department of Government Efficiency, such as lawyer James Burnham<\/a>, who\u2019s now xAI\u2019s general counsel. The billionaire has leaned on some family: Andrew Musk, his cousin who has done stints at Neuralink and Tesla, has also worked as an engineer at xAI. <\/p>\n

(All start dates and job titles are based on public statements, Bloomberg reporting and LinkedIn information.)<\/p>\n

Like many of Musk\u2019s other businesses, the inner workings and power dynamics of xAI are rarely discussed publicly. Musk, who has been extremely hands-on at the company in an effort to expedite its progress, is known for having ultimate control and dictating virtually all major decisions and strategies to his lieutenants. That brain trust is then tasked with executing his vision.<\/p>\n

Currently, a key part of that vision is boosting sales. XAI is working to diversify its revenue, including by selling computing infrastructure to some rivals. In recent weeks, xAI has introduced an AI coding agent<\/a> to compete in a lucrative market where it has lagged behind Anthropic PBC and OpenAI. XAI\u2019s team has also been pitching Wall Street firms<\/a> \u2014 including some with ties to Musk\u2019s businesses \u2014 to adopt its Grok chatbot<\/a> and has been boosting its sales team. <\/p>\n

Even as Musk works on rebuilding the firm, the three-year old business is still in constant flux. XAI\u2019s management lines change frequently as the billionaire brings in new engineers and rearranges the ranks. Musk\u2019s venture capital allies, including Valor Equity Partners<\/a> and Vy Capital, have worn multiple hats during xAI\u2019s short lifetime. Valor\u2019s Jon Shulkin<\/a> had been working at xAI as its chief revenue officer and is now moving to an advisery role, Bloomberg previously reported. Nicolls, meanwhile, now has the bulk of the engineering team reporting to him, including hires from Google and AI firm Cursor. They work across infrastructure, data curation, software and Grok\u2019s products.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s inner circle will help set the course for xAI, but also influence AI-related initiatives across his multitrillion-dollar empire, from how artificial intelligence is used to serve ads on the social network X to eventually powering humanoid robots for Tesla. <\/p>\n

With assistance from<\/p>\n

Dana Hull and\u00a0Loren Grush<\/p>\n

Editors<\/p>\n

Seth Fiegerman and\u00a0Kurt Wagner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk has long viewed artificial intelligence as critical to his sprawling business empire. Now, he\u2019s increasingly relying…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45145,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[27463,25,27462,372,6321,27464,3831,16405,27466,27467,27465,836,139,2899],"class_list":["post-45144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-xai","tag-antonio-j-gracias","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-elon-reeve-musk","tag-engineering","tag-executives","tag-government-spending","tag-ipos","tag-money-manager","tag-page-graphic","tag-region-global","tag-secondary-brand-technology","tag-tesla-inc","tag-venture-capital","tag-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}