Elon Musk has vowed to pay Tesla AI engineers more money after accusing rival OpenAI of poaching his staff.
The billionaire businessman claims a few members of staff have moved over to the ChatGPT creator after they allegedly were offered “massive compensation offers.”
“They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases,” he posted to X.
So now Musk is trying to lure his former employees back to Telsa —and keep the ones he already has.
“Tesla is increasing comp [contingent on progress milestones] of our AI engineering team,” he wrote in another post.
OpenAI’s co-founders recently accused former board member Musk of wanting “absolute control” of the ChatGPT creator.
The tech mogul is suing OpenAI — which he helped found the company in 2015 — and its chief executive Sam Altman for alleged breach of contract.
Through his lawyers, Musk claimed they started the nonprofit for the “benefit of humanity” and that they care more about profits.
The SpaceX founder stepped down as a board member back in 2018.
In response, OpenAI’s co-founders claimed Musk wanted to be CEO of the business and suggested merging it with Tesla.
“In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding. Reid Hoffman bridged the gap to cover salaries and operations,” a blog post by OpenAI co-founders Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman and Wojciech Zaremba read.
“We couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI,” the post continued. “He then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla. In early February 2018, Elon forwarded us an email suggesting that OpenAI should ‘attach to Tesla as its cash cow,’ commenting that it was ‘exactly right … Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google.’ Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero.”
Musk has since set up a startup for his own, xAI, for which he is seeking investors.
