Reid Hoffman Says SpaceX Is Not an AI Company and xAI Is a ‘Complete Failure’

LinkedIn co-founder and OpenAI and Anthropic investor Reid Hoffman said an AI company's core business should be model development, not renting out GPU computing capacity. SpaceX has commercialized capacity at its Colossus data center and signed a $6.3 billion contract with Reflection AI, prompting Hoffman to compare it to a “high-priced CoreWeave” and question its status as an AI company.

Hoffman said on the Pioneers of AI podcast on June 24, 2026, that SpaceX was not an AI company and called xAI a “complete failure.” As of May that year, all 11 of xAI's original co-founders had left. Its flagship Grok model continued to trail OpenAI and Anthropic in benchmark tests, while the company was undergoing its third restructuring.