Elon Musk is back to asking xAI employees to prove ‘what you’ve accomplished’

By Hadas Gold, CNN

(CNN) — Elon Musk is back to business – and back to sending emails asking employees what they’ve accomplished.

On Tuesday afternoon, Musk sent an email 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 in the email, according to a copy of the email shared with CNN by a source familiar with the situation. A spokesperson for xAI did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk is known for making such requests from employees at various companies and agencies he has led throughout his career.

In August 2024, Musk sent out an email to all staff 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 way to make “stock & option awards proportionate to the likely future contributions of people at X,” according to a source who received the email. The Verge first reported on the email last year.

While Musk was advising the White House and the Department of Government Efficiencies, all federal employees were sent mass emails asking them to list what they accomplished in the past week. Musk announced on X at the time that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

But the emails were sent so broadly, federal employees working in sensitive areas such as national security and the judiciary were warned by agency leaders not to respond. In February, the Office of Personnel Management told agencies that responses to Musk’s email were voluntary and failure to respond did not equal resignation. By August, the entire program was completely rolled back by OPM.

When Musk first acquired Twitter in 2022, he at one point asked employees to print out lines of code they’d recently written, according to Platformer. Then, reversing course, he told them to shred what they had printed.

It’s not clear what Musk intends to do with the information xAI employees provide. The company plans to hold a three-hour all-hands meeting Wednesday, a source familiar with the meeting told CNN. Last week Business Insider reported that xAI laid off hundreds of workers on its data annotation team, including “AI tutors” who help train the Grok AI chatbot.

Musk’s xAI company is a relative newcomer into the highly lucrative and fast-growing artificial intelligence space. It’s behind Grok, the controversial AI chatbot that is also integrated into the X social network. Musk has often publicly commented on adjusting Grok’s responses, especially when they don’t align with his worldview. Grok has at times offered racist, antisemitic and other problematic responses to queries on X – which the company later said it had fixed. Its image generation technology has far fewer restrictions when it comes to adult content than those offered by competitors, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Despite the Grok’s controversies, it has some high-profile fans, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

“My relationship with Elon is excellent, and our relationship is largely around collaboration and engineering,” Huang told CNN Wednesday in an interview in 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 said he is a frequent Grok user.

“I use it regularly and use it almost every day,” Huang said. “I think it’s an excellent model, and I think he has an excellent chance to take a leadership position in AI.”

CNN’s Anna Cooban contributed to this report.

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