SpaceXAI Loses Dozens of Staff After Merger, Chasing Claude

1 articles · Updated · Bloomberg · Jul 16

Dozens of xAI employees left after Elon Musk merged the startup with SpaceX earlier this year and later renamed it SpaceXAI, leaving daily operations chaotic, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.
Michael Nicolls, installed this spring to run the company, was tasked with closing the gap with Anthropic’s Claude and making Grok “maximally useful,” according to an internal memo.
Internal projects and Slack channels explicitly referenced Claude, underscoring how closely SpaceXAI benchmarked its chatbot against a rival it wanted to lure users away from.
The merger was meant to give the struggling AI startup more resources and offer the broader company another pitch to Wall Street investors, but it also triggered an identity crisis and the exit of many co-founders.