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XAI reorganizes its engineering team ahead of SpaceX IPO

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As Elon Musk’s xAI merges more closely with SpaceX ahead of the space giant’s blockbuster IPO, the AI company is undergoing yet another major overhaul to its engineering team, according to a memo viewed by Business Insider.

SpaceX executive Michael Nicholls said the company is “clearly behind” the competition and is taking action to catch up as quickly as possible.

Nicholls, the senior vice president of Starlink at SpaceX, has taken on the title of xAI president, a person with knowledge of the change told Business Insider.

SpaceX, which acquired xAI earlier this year, is expected to file an initial public offering this year, which could value it at over $2 trillion, according to some reports.

As it merges with SpaceX, xAI has undergone a series of organizational shake-ups while racing to keep pace with AI rivals OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The company has lost several cofounders and senior leaders, most recently Ross Nordeen, formerly one of Musk’s closest deputies. Now, Musk is using the Tesla playbook to rebuild the company from the ground up, even as it navigates ongoing departures and layoffs. The stakes couldn’t be higher: xAI is pushing toward an IPO that could value the company in the trillions.

Model training

Devendra Chaplot, a former researcher at Facebook and Thinking Machines Labs, who joined the xAI last month, will lead pre-training, the initial phase in which a model learns general patterns from massive datasets, such as text, images, or code.

Aman Madaan will oversee model factory and tooling, including the infrastructure, data pipelines, and training workflows used to develop and improve AI models. Aditya Gupta will head post-training and reinforcement learning, the final stage in which the model is fine-tuned, aligned with human preferences, and optimized for real-world use cases like chat or coding assistance.

Beibin Li, a former researcher at Microsoft and Meta, will lead post-training for Grok Code. Xuhui Jia, who previously worked at Google DeepMind, along with Yukun Zhu, will lead video and image training.

Product and Infrastructure

The company’s product team will be led by Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg. The two engineers joined the company from AI coding giant Cursor in March. The product team will oversee Grok Main, Grok Voice, and Grok Imagine.

Physical infrastructure will be led by Jake Palmer, and compute infrastructure by Daniel Dueri, who is the director of software engineering at SpaceX, according to LinkedIn. Other SpaceX employees have also taken on leadership roles. Matt Monson, the director of Starlink software at SpaceX, will also be leading data at xAI.

On the compute team, the training performance of xAI’s compute is “embarrassingly low,” Nicholls said in the memo, and the company plans to improve it significantly in the next two months.

A spokesperson for xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nicholls said in the internal memo that the changes are effective immediately and the company is working on giving staff titles that better describe their work.

Musk first reorganized the company in February, after xAI was acquired by SpaceX. Since January, eight of the engineers who helped found the company alongside Elon Musk have left the company, including cofounders Nordeen, Guodong Zhang, and Manuel Kroiss, who led Grok Code, and Toby Pohlen, who helped lead Macrohard, the company’s computer use agent project.

In the wake of the cofounder departures, the company’s structure has been in a near-constant state of flux, with Musk at times managing dozens of direct reports. Tesla and SpaceX engineers have also come into the company’s Palo Alto office to assist with the changes, people with knowledge of the issue said.

XAI has shed dozens of employees since February, Business Insider previously reported. The company cut portions of its teams working on its video and image generation tool, Grok Imagine, and Macrohard, its AI agent project, earlier this year, Business Insider also previously reported. More recently, the company has cut several members of its recruiting team, according to people with knowledge of the cuts.

In March, Musk said on X that “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”

He has also said that the company is looking back through old xAI candidates to bring in new people.

“Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI,” Musk wrote on X.

Do you work at xAI or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gkay@businessinsider.com or Signal at 248-894-6012. Use a personal email address, a nonwork device, and nonwork WiFi; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.




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SpaceX ran a Super Bowl ad — a first for Elon Musk’s business empire

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  • SpaceX ran its first Super Bowl ad on Sunday, promoting its Starlink internet service.
  • It’s the first time any of Elon Musk’s companies have run an ad at the Super Bowl.
  • Tesla and SpaceX have avoided traditional advertising in the past, but that is beginning to change.

SpaceX has made its Super Bowl debut ahead of a potential record-breaking IPO.

The rocket company ran its first Super Bowl ad for its Starlink satellite internet on Sunday, the first time any of Elon Musk’s companies have run an ad at the showpiece event.

The 30-second spot features audio from a speech by legendary science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, set to footage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Starship rocket boosters returning to Earth.

It shows Starlink operating in a series of remote locations and touts the satellite internet service’s mission of “fast, affordable internet, available everywhere.”

The ad marks a departure for Musk’s companies, which have in the past shunned advertising in favor of using the billionaire’s outspoken public persona for publicity.

Tesla reportedly laid off its entire marketing team during widespread workforce cuts in 2024, while SpaceX has typically relied on eye-catching rocket tests, such as its Starship booster catch, to boost its public profile.

Both companies have started running advertising in recent years across a number of platforms, including Musk’s X, and Starlink has previously featured in Super Bowl ads run by partners such as T-Mobile.

SpaceX running its own stand-alone Super Bowl ad is a significant development, with 30-second ad slots costing between $8 million and $10 million on average this year, per broadcaster NBCUniversal.

It comes as SpaceX gears up for a public offering later this year that could value the rocket company at as much as $1.5 trillion.

Last week, Musk announced that SpaceX would merge with his AI startup xAI, in a move the world’s richest man said would help launch a network of solar-powered orbital data centers to train powerful AI models.

SpaceX’s recent success has been driven in large part by Starlink, which uses a constellation of more than 9,000 low-orbit satellites to provide wireless internet. In December, the company said Starlink has 9 million customers and is active in 155 countries.




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Elon Musk said we’d reach Mars in 2026. Now, he says SpaceX is building a city on the moon.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX just overhauled its to-do list.

In an X post on Sunday, the CEO said that the company is shifting its focus from Mars to creating a “self-growing city” on the moon.

“It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2 day trip time),” Musk wrote. “This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city.”

The announcement is a big departure from Musk’s previous comments about reaching the red planet this year.

In 2020, the SpaceX CEO said he was confident that the company would land humans on Mars by 2026.

“If we get lucky, maybe four years,” Musk said at an awards show in 2020. “We want to send an uncrewed vehicle there in two years.”

The space company has historically delayed ambitious projects because of their complexity and regulatory challenges. Last week, the company delayed the Artemis 2 moon mission, the first human moon mission in more than 50 years.

Mars is still part of the plan

In Sunday’s post, Musk added that SpaceX would continue building a Mars city, starting in five to seven years.

“But the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster,” he wrote.

Last week, Musk announced that SpaceX would acquire xAI, his AI company behind the chatbot Grok. XAI purchased the social media platform X in March 2025.

The CEO wrote that SpaceX’s xAI acquisition would create “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform.”

In the memo, Musk shared plans to have “self-growing bases” and factories on the moon. He also mentioned having “an entire civilization on Mars.”




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XAI shares Q&A with staff on what they can expect from the SpaceX merger

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XAI told workers the company won’t be changing its name anytime soon, even after it announced SpaceX had acquired the company on Monday.

In a Q&A sent to employees on Monday, the company said xAI’s mission remains “unchanged” and that its price-to-share valuation will remain the same. Workers will soon learn more about how the acquisition will impact their equity, according to the Q&A.

The joint venture is still continuing to prepare for a “possible IPO in 2026,” according to the memo.

“Whether it actually happens, when it happens, and at what valuation are still highly uncertain,” it said.

SpaceX, which Musk founded in 2002, has reportedly been gearing up for an initial public offering that could value it at $1.5 trillion.

SpaceX and xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

XAI plans to hold an all-hands in the coming days and host trainings related to the merger, the internal memo said. For now, both companies will maintain their separate branding, but the company “will be looking at how this might change in the future,” it said.

Despite the acquisition, xAI staff will not be allowed to access internal SpaceX databases or collaborate directly with workers at the rocket ship company without direct approval, the memo said. The companies will be kept separate due to regulations that control the sharing of defense and space-related technology that could impact national security. SpaceX workers may be allowed access to xAI internal tools, it said.

SpaceX and xAI CEO Elon Musk sent a memo to staff earlier on Monday announcing the acquisition. In the email, which was later shared online, he said the merger would allow the joint venture to eventually launch data centers in space.

He wrote that the deal would create “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform.”

Last year, Musk announced that xAI merged with his social media company, X.

Do you work for xAI or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gkay@businessinsider.com or Signal at 248-894-6012. Use a personal email address, a non-work device, and non-work WiFi; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.




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All the ways Elon Musk’s companies are already intertwined, from a Tesla ‘collab’ with SpaceX to Grok in vehicles

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Elon Musk has for years blurred the lines between the companies he leads.

The intermingling of Elon Inc. businesses — a number which shrank from six entities to five when xAI acquired X last year, and from five to four when SpaceX acquired xAI on Monday — is something of signature for the CEO.

Over the past three years, his companies have stepped up their internal dealings, investing billions in one another, agreeing to buy up each other’s products, and exchanging software and materials.

The result is a tightly knit corporate ecosystem centered on Musk, where work — and even employees — can flow between the various entities in the name of vertical integration.

Here are some of the recent sharing agreements, purchases, and investments between Musk’s companies.

Musk’s employees often work between companies


Elon Musk took over Twitter about a year ago.

Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk brought Tesla engineers into the offices to work on its code base.

Photo by -/Twitter account of Elon Musk/AFP via Getty Images



Musk has repeatedly drawn on employees from one company to support others in his portfolio.

In 2022, about a month after Musk bought Twitter — now known as X — he sent roughly 50 Tesla employees to the social-media company’s headquarters to help overhaul its code-review systems, according to court filings.

Musk later argued in court that the Tesla employees had “volunteered” to do the work and that their temporary reassignment should not concern Tesla’s board.

Executives share overlapping functions on several of Musk’s companies, too, according to insider org charts obtained by Business Insider.

For example, Charlie Kuehmann, the vice president of materials and engineering at Tesla, also holds the same title at SpaceX.

SpaceX contributes to Roadster, Tesla provides SpaceX with energy-storage systems


A Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX takes off from a launch pad in Florida during a clear day.

SpaceX is lending rocket-boosting tech to Tesla’s upcoming hyper-powered sports car, Musk said.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images



SpaceX is a major customer of Tesla’s energy business, purchasing batteries for robotics power and Megapack energy-storage systems.

It also reportedly invested $2 billion into xAI as a part of a previous funding round.

Musk has also said that Tesla’s long-awaited next-generation Roadster will be a “Tesla/SpaceX collab” and feature SpaceX-built cold-gas thrusters. The hyper-powered sports car’s launch event is penciled in for April 1.

“It’s gonna be really cool, and it’s gonna have some rocket technology in it,” Musk also said during a 2024 sit-down with Don Lemon.

SpaceX and Boring Company buy Tesla cars


Boring Company Tesla entering tunnel

A Tesla entering the Hawthorne Tunnel, made by Elon Musk’s Boring Co.

Robyn Beck/Pool via REUTERS



Aside from full-blown investments or acquisitions, the most publicly visible example of Musk’s companies coordinating might be Tesla’s vehicle sales to his tunnel-building start-up.

The Boring Company, which operates tunnels in Las Vegas and Texas, uses fleets of Tesla vehicles to transport passengers through its underground systems. The tunnel builder has also constructed tunnels around Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas.

It isn’t alone. SpaceX also purchased an unspecified number of Musk’s Cybertrucks.

Tesla and xAI’s ‘framework agreement’ follows Grok integration into cars, Optimus demo bots.


A person in light blue jeans sits in the front passenger seat inside a self-driving Tesla.

Tesla wants to build out its AI software, including its self-driving ambitions. CEO Elon Musk said a $2 billion investment in his software company would help.

Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images



Tesla’s earnings on Wednesday disclosed that it had agree to invest $2 billion in xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, with a related “framework agreement” to explore additional collaboration opportunities.

Tesla has already integrated xAI’s Grok into its vehicles, allowing drivers to chat with the AI and use it to add and edit navigation destinations.

Videos have shown early versions of Tesla’s in-development Optimus robot using xAI’s Grok AI chatbot for its voice.

xAI has also reportedly told investors that it’s working on AI that could power Tesla’s forthcoming Optimus humanoid robots.

Tesla executives said the $2 billion investment supports the automaker’s push into self-driving technology. For example, the earnings deck explained that xAI-developed software will analyze vehicle interiors and assist with route planning, including adding high-occupancy-vehicle lanes when the car is full.

For xAI, the investment adds capital to the cash-hungry buildout of data centers and their energy needs.

The deal marked one of the clearest examples of capital flowing from Musk’s public company into a privately held firm he controls.

It’s all par for the course for ‘Elon Inc.’

The growing web of internal deals has fueled discussion among investors and analysts about whether Musk’s companies are evolving into something closer to a single, vertically integrated enterprise.

And it’s not clear if it’ll stop at SpaceX combining with xAI.

There’s also been recent reports that Tesla could combine with SpaceX.

“In Tesla’s case, an important factor to consider is that investors are buying into Elon Musk’s vision for the future as much as they are buying into an automaker or clean energy company,” Lou Whiteman, a contributing analyst at The Motley Fool, told Business Insider.

“Since this group of companies, public and private, combine to represent Elon Musk’s full vision of the future, I’d bet that many investors are happy to see Tesla involved in all aspects of ‘Elon Inc.'”




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What is Elon Musk’s net worth? Find out the wealth of the Tesla, SpaceX CEO

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Elon Musk has a net worth of around $638 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

His net worth is closely tied to Tesla’s share price, but the tech mogul’s wealth comes from several sources and often fluctuates. He crossed over the $600 billion threshold in December following an $800 billion valuation of SpaceX.

That means Musk regularly trades places with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison for the title of world’s richest person.

How has Musk’s net worth changed over time?

Musk, who was born in South Africa, moved to Canada and dropped out of a Ph.D. at Stanford, became a millionaire before he hit 30. Musk started Zip2, a website that provided city travel guides to newspapers, with his brother Kimbal Musk, and sold it to Compaq for more than $300 million in 1999. Musk, then aged 27, is believed to have got $22 million from the deal.

He went on to cofound online bank X.com in 1999. It soon merged with Peter Thiel’s Confinity to become PayPal, and the company was bought for $1.5 billion by eBay in 2002. Despite having been ousted as CEO, Musk walked away with around $165 million. 

Musk cofounded space-exploration company SpaceX in 2002. In 2004, he became an investor in and the chairman of EV company Tesla.

During the financial crisis in 2008, he saved Tesla from bankruptcy with a $40 million investment and a $40 million loan. That same year, he was named Tesla’s CEO.

Musk said 2008 was “the worst year of my life.” Alongside problems in his personal life, Tesla kept losing money and SpaceX was having trouble launching the first version of its Falcon rocket. By 2009, Musk was living off personal loans.

Tesla went public in 2010, though, and Musk’s estimated net worth steadily climbed. In 2012, he debuted on Forbes’ Billionaires List with an estimated wealth of $2 billion. 

In 2016, Musk set up the tunnel-digging business, the Boring Company.

The next year, he founded the neurotechnology startup Neuralink.

Musk’s net worth began a rapid ascent at the start of the pandemic as Tesla stock prices soared. Musk started 2020 with an estimated net worth of just under $30 billion and was worth around $170 billion just a year later — a more than five-fold increase in just a year. His estimated fortune peaked at around $340 billion in November 2021.

Musk also bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, serving as its CEO until he stepped down in early June 2023.

The stock is known to be volatile and has had its ups and downs since then.

The morning of Trump’s reelection on November 6, 2024, which Musk heavily campaigned for, Tesla’s stock was up about 15%, for instance.

Following an insider share sale at SpaceX, which boosted the startup to a $350 billion valuation, Musk’s wealth surged again in December 2024 by about $50 billion in one day, making Musk the first billionaire to reach the $400 billion mark.

But in the months following its election highs, Tesla’s stock dropped by over 50% following a number of factors, including a vehicle sales slump, a rising Tesla boycott movement, and Musk’s stint in the US government, which some investors felt took him away from his day-in-day-out Tesla CEO duties.

Tesla’s stock rose back up following the CEO taking a step back from his role in the Department of Government Efficiency, but it continues to have big swings. Musk had one of his single-day highest net worth losses in June 2025 following a public spat on social media with the President, in which Trump floated the idea of having his government contracts revoked, and Musk repeatedly criticized Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

The stock has since rebounded and was up over 25% in 2025 as of December.

Musk’s net worth reached unprecedented heights in December 2025, as Musk confirmed SpaceX was planning an IPO. After an insider share sale valued the private company at $800 billion, Musk’s estimated net worth surpassed $600 billion.

Musk was the first billionaire to have reached a net worth of over $500 billion, according to Forbes, making him one step closer to becoming the world’s first trillionaire.

Where does Musk’s fortune come from?

Musk’s wealth is largely dependent on Tesla shares. Though he takes no salary from Tesla, he’s awarded stock options when the company hits challenging performance metrics.

Musk’s previous $55 billion compensation plan was voided in January 2024 on the grounds that Musk had undue influence over the package and its approval due to close ties with several board members. At its annual shareholder meeting in 2024, investors voted to approve Musk’s pay package. However, the judge upheld the original ruling, and the company has since appealed the decision.

A compensation package Tesla proposed for its CEO in September 2025 could turn Musk into the first trillionaire. The unprecedented plan included a new set of 12 milestones to be completed over a 10-year period, such as boosting the company’s valuation to $8.5 trillion, selling 12 million cars, getting a million robotaxis on the road, and coming up with a succession plan.

A large part of Musk’s net worth comes from Tesla shares, while roughly over 20% comes from SpaceX stock.

The rest of his wealth comes from shares in Twitter and The Boring Company, as well as other miscellaneous liabilities.




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