Elon Musk Orders xAI Staff to Submit One-Page Work Summaries
Elon Musk has directed employees at his artificial intelligence company, xAI, to provide detailed summaries of their recent work.
In an email sent Tuesday afternoon, Musk asked all staff to submit “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” by noon on Thursday, according to CNN.
The request echoes similar moves Musk has made across his various companies. In 2024, he asked staff at X (formerly Twitter) for one-page summaries of their contributions, linking them to potential stock and option awards. During his brief stint advising the White House, federal employees also received mass emails demanding weekly accomplishment reports—an initiative later rolled back after concerns about its scope and legality.
Musk has long employed unconventional management tactics. Shortly after acquiring Twitter in 2022, he told engineers to print out their recent code, only to later order them to shred it.
It remains unclear what Musk intends to do with the latest xAI submissions. The company is scheduled to hold a three-hour all-hands meeting on Wednesday, a source told CNN.
The directive comes days after xAI reportedly laid off hundreds of workers from its data annotation team, including “AI tutors” responsible for training its Grok chatbot.
Despite controversies over Grok’s responses—including racist and antisemitic outputs, the chatbot has gained traction. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, speaking to CNN in the UK, described Musk as “an excellent engineer” and revealed he uses Grok “almost every day.”
