xAI Startup Company Poaches Tesla Engineer; Elon Musk to Increase Tesla Pay to Prevent OpenAI From Recruiting Talents

xAI, an artificial intelligence startup company launched by Elon Musk, reportedly poached another engineer from Tesla electric car manufacturer. The 53-year-old billionaire only introduced the said AI firm last year.

As per Electrek, xAI’s hiring of Tesla engineers has become controversial mainly because Musk previously said that his EV brand is an AI company. Thus, the employees’ move to xAI is clearly “poaching” as it recruited the engineer from a similar company.

Musk to Focus on AI Projects Outside of Tesla

Musk has been asking for 25% voting control over Tesla, which is said to be a strange request. Moreover, it was said that he made this move due to fears that some group could take over the company and take control of the existing AI projects.

He explained that if he could not get this level of control, it would be better for them to develop and build products outside of Tesla. Observers assumed this was the reason why Musk launched xAI, which allowed him to do all the artificial intelligence projects without hurdles. But then again, many saw the creation of the tech startup as a “clear conflict of interest” since Musk admitted that he will now focus more on AI away from Tesla.

Job Recruitments at xAI

Since xAI has many plans, it is already hiring staff for its projects. However, it was revealed that it has also been recruiting from Tesla's AI team. As of this week, the company reportedly poached another engineer, making this the fourth employee to leave the automaker.

Ethan Knight, a machine-learning scientist at Tesla, has become the fourth engineer recruited by xAi. The three other engineers who joined the AI startup in the last 12 months worked at Tesla on supercomputing, AI infrastructure, and autopilot developments.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that Musk responded to the reports about Knight’s departure from Tesla to move to xAI. He explained that the engineer was supposed to go to OpenAI so it is better to just hire him again for xAI this time. Musk also said they will raise the salaries of Tesla engineers to prevent OpenAI from poaching them again.

“There are over 200 excellent engineers in the Tesla AI/Autonomy team,” the billionaire said via a post on X. “Tesla’s pace of progress with autonomy is accelerating and the talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I have ever seen!”

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