Tesla CEO Elon Musk is increasing salaries for his AI engineers as he claimed that he is in an aggressive poaching war with rival AI companies, like OpenAI. This comes after Tesla engineer Ethan Knight left for Elon Musk’s new startup, The Fortune reported. Elon Musk has a strained relationship with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and has sued him over alleged contract breaches.
What Elon Musk said on the report?
On his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk responded to the news saying, “Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them. They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases.”
“Ethan is very talented, but “vision chief” would be overstating things. There are over 200 excellent engineers in the Tesla AI/Autonomy team. Tesla’s pace of progress with autonomy is accelerating. The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen,” he said in another tweet.
Tesla investors are mighty concerned?
The report also claimed that this has raised concerned for Tesla investors as Elon Musk is using less traditional methods, like moving staff between companies while Tesla’s core car business is slowing. Some shareholders question the ethics of Elon Musk using Tesla resources for his personal ventures, the report added.
What could be Elon Musk’s real motive behind the talent war?
But through this move, Elon Musk could be trying to portray himself as a “victim” of poaching which elevates xAI’s reputation because if a company like OpenAI wants his staff, then xAI must be doing something right, the report claimed.
