SpaceX Starlink Engineer Joins xAI to Lead Grok Model Training

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015, with Musk contributing about $38 million before leaving in 2018. In 2024, he sued OpenAI, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, alleging that the company had abandoned its public-interest mission and seeking the return of $134 billion in benefits to the nonprofit entity. His position in the lawsuit has faced scrutiny because xAI is also a competitor.

On April 30, 2026, the third day of trial in a California federal court, Musk acknowledged under cross-examination that xAI had “partially” distilled outputs from OpenAI models when training Grok. He said the practice was common across the AI industry. Musk also ranked Anthropic as the world’s strongest AI company, ahead of OpenAI, Google and Chinese open-source models, and said xAI had only several hundred employees.

Elon Musk founded xAI in 2023, and Grok initially focused on general-purpose question answering. Generative AI companies are now competing for a role in financial institutions and investment workflows. OpenAI and Anthropic have introduced financial analysis tools, while xAI’s recruitment of Wall Street practitioners signals an effort to strengthen its enterprise offering and Grok’s reasoning capabilities for complex credit products.

On March 16, 2026, xAI posted openings on its website for bankers, private credit lenders, portfolio managers, traders and credit analysts to join Grok’s data-labeling team. The training covers leveraged loan syndication, distressed investing, mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs). US positions pay $45–$100 per hour, with contractors averaging at least 10 hours of project work per week.