Person
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX who was also a co-founder and early funder of OpenAI, a lab he left in 2018 and later turned against. In 2023 he launched his own AI company, xAI, whose chatbot Grok is built into his social platform X; in February 2026 he folded xAI and X into SpaceX in an all-stock merger valuing the combined company at around $1.25 trillion, tied to a plan for data centres in orbit. He sued OpenAI and Sam Altman over their move to a for-profit structure, dropping most claims before a jury dismissed the remainder in May 2026. Grok has repeatedly drawn scrutiny over safety and content, including cases where it amplified fabricated news and generated non-consensual imagery.
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Tracks
- Courts & copyright 11
- Labs & people 9
- Models & capabilities 6
- Government & policy 5
- Money & business 5
- Compute & infrastructure 4
- Ideas & essays 3
- Culture & impact 3
- Safety & alignment 2
- Security & misuse 2
- Open weights & ecosystem 2
- Benchmarks & progress 2
xAI releases Grok 4.7
xAI reported a larger base model than Grok 4.6, up to 2.1 trillion parameters against a reported 1.5 trillion, at unchanged pricing; independent ranking placed it sixth on Artificial Analysis's GDPval-AA index.
Models & capabilities
Subscribers sue four AI labs, calling their pacing pledge a cartel
A proposed class action says the labs' public agreement to slow capability gains is a Sherman Act output-restriction cartel, and seeks treble damages.
Courts & copyright
Amodei calls for pacing the AI frontier, and Altman and Musk agree
Anthropic's chief executive argued frontier labs should slow capability gains until safety catches up; Altman said OpenAI would adopt his embedded-evaluator proposal, and Musk posted 'Dario is right'.
Safety & alignment · Ideas & essays · Government & policy
xAI releases a new Grok model that a benchmark firm rates on par with OpenAI's flagship
Priced the same as its predecessor at $2/$6 per million tokens; Musk said a larger Grok 4.7 was already in training and expected within three to four weeks.
Models & capabilities
DeepMind's Hassabis proposes a FINRA-style US body to vet frontier AI models
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella and Anthropic's Jack Clark all publicly praised the proposal, an unusual moment of agreement among rival lab leaders.
Government & policy · Safety & alignment · Ideas & essays
Jury dismisses Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman
The jury took under two hours to decide Musk's claims fell outside a three-year statute of limitations, without ruling on whether the alleged breach of trust actually occurred.
Courts & copyright · Labs & people
Musk v Altman/OpenAI trial begins
Musk sought as much as $134bn in damages to be paid to OpenAI's charity, plus Altman's removal from the board, in a case tried before a nine-member advisory jury in Oakland.
Courts & copyright · Money & business · Labs & people
Musk drops most claims against OpenAI and Altman ahead of trial
Musk narrowed his suit from 26 claims to two — unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust — after Judge Gonzalez Rogers granted his request to streamline the case.
Courts & copyright
Grok 5 still in training as its Q1 2026 target looks unlikely
Elon Musk had targeted Q1 2026 for the roughly 6-trillion-parameter model; by late January trackers reported it still training on Colossus 2 with no ship date confirmed.
Models & capabilities
Unsealed filing details OpenAI's account of the Musk restructuring dispute
The filing said Musk had sought majority equity control and roughly $80bn for a self-sustaining Mars city; Altman posted the claim publicly on X the same day.
Courts & copyright · Labs & people
xAI expands Colossus 2 toward 2-gigawatt capacity
The third building, reportedly nicknamed 'Macrohardrr' and sited in Southaven, Mississippi, targets roughly 555,000 Nvidia GB200 and GB300 chips.
Compute & infrastructure
xAI's Grok Edit Image feature used to mass-produce nonconsensual sexualized images
The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated over 3 million sexualized images were generated in 11 days, roughly 23,000 depicting apparent children, before X restricted the feature to paid users.
Security & misuse · Culture & impact
xAI open-sources Grok 2 weights
The roughly 500GB release, under a custom community licence that bars using the weights to train rival foundation models, requires eight GPUs of over 40GB each to run.
Open weights & ecosystem
xAI sues Apple and OpenAI alleging an illegal AI monopoly on iPhones
The 61-page complaint, filed in a Texas federal court, alleges Apple manipulated App Store rankings to favour ChatGPT and delayed approval of Grok app updates.
Courts & copyright
xAI releases Grok-4
xAI reported 44.4% on Humanity's Last Exam for its multi-agent "Heavy" tier, ahead of Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3, though the score had not yet appeared on the public leaderboard.
Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress
xAI raises $10 billion in debt and equity
Split evenly between debt arranged by Morgan Stanley and a strategic equity investment, the round carried no series letter; reporting later put the resulting valuation at roughly $150 billion.
Money & business
NAACP threatens lawsuit over air pollution from xAI's Memphis data centre
A Clean Air Act notice alleged xAI ran roughly 35 methane gas turbines without required permits at its Colossus site, in a neighbourhood already facing above-average cancer risk.
Culture & impact · Compute & infrastructure
Grok posts unprompted 'white genocide' content about South Africa
xAI said an employee's unauthorised change to Grok's system prompt caused the chatbot to raise South African 'white genocide' claims in replies unrelated to the topic.
Security & misuse · Culture & impact
OpenAI abandons plan to convert to full for-profit control, nonprofit to keep control
The for-profit arm still becomes a public benefit corporation, but after talks with California and Delaware's attorneys general the nonprofit keeps its controlling stake.
Labs & people · Money & business
OpenAI countersues Musk, alleging harassment campaign
OpenAI called Musk's $97.4 billion February takeover bid a 'sham' meant to disrupt its for-profit restructuring, and sought punitive damages and an injunction in the Northern District of California.
Courts & copyright
Judge denies Musk's bid to block OpenAI's for-profit conversion
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers called the underlying charitable-trust question a 'toss-up' but offered an expedited trial for the autumn given the public interest at stake.
Courts & copyright
xAI releases Grok-3
xAI reported Grok 3 beating GPT-4o and o3-mini-high on AIME and GPQA using roughly ten times the compute of Grok 2, on figures the company had not independently verified.
Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress
xAI raises $6bn Series C at ~$50bn valuation with Nvidia and AMD as investors
xAI's own announcement did not state a valuation; press reports of the figure ranged from just over $40 billion to roughly $50 billion.
Money & business
OpenAI publishes internal emails on Elon Musk's early push for a for-profit structure
The post answered a preliminary-injunction motion Musk's lawyers had filed weeks earlier seeking to block OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit company.
Courts & copyright · Labs & people
xAI opens Colossus supercomputer in Memphis
xAI switched on 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs in a converted Memphis factory, a build the company said took roughly 122 days from empty shell to training-ready cluster.
Compute & infrastructure
California legislature passes SB 1047
The Assembly passed the bill 48-16 on 28 August and the Senate concurred 30-9 the next day, sending it to Governor Newsom, who vetoed it a month later.
Government & policy
xAI raises $6bn Series B at $24bn valuation
Investors including Valor Equity, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia and Fidelity backed the round, roughly a year after xAI's founding, to fund a supercomputer for xAI's next model.
Money & business
xAI open-sources Grok-1
A 314-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts base model, unfine-tuned and released under Apache 2.0, using only a quarter of its weights per token.
Open weights & ecosystem
OpenAI responds to Elon Musk's lawsuit over its founding mission
OpenAI said Musk had contributed $45 million rather than the $1 billion he pledged, and published emails in which he proposed merging OpenAI into Tesla or taking full control.
Courts & copyright · Labs & people
Musk sues OpenAI over its for-profit turn
The complaint alleged a founding pact to develop AGI 'for the benefit of humanity' had been broken for Microsoft's profit; OpenAI said no such agreement existed.
Courts & copyright · Labs & people
xAI unveils Grok
A chatbot with real-time access to X posts and a deliberately irreverent persona, initially released to a small group ahead of a wider subscriber rollout.
Models & capabilities
Schumer convenes tech chief executives behind closed doors
About two-thirds of the Senate attended; press and public were excluded, and no senator was permitted to ask a question.
Government & policy
xAI launches
Staffed by alumni of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research and Tesla, the company was announced as legally separate from Musk's X Corp but working closely with it.
Labs & people
Elon Musk incorporates X.AI
Registered in Nevada weeks after Musk signed the pause letter, the filing named him director and his family-office manager Jared Birchall as secretary.
Labs & people
The "Pause Giant AI Experiments" open letter
Thirty thousand signatories called for a six-month halt on training systems more powerful than GPT-4. No lab paused.
Ideas & essays · Government & policy
Tesla announces the Dojo training supercomputer
Tesla's in-house D1 chip and 'ExaPod' racks were designed to train self-driving neural networks on video from its vehicle fleet, targeting over an exaflop of compute.
Compute & infrastructure
In the commentary
Pieces from around the web that discuss Elon Musk. External links.
- 17 February 2026 · Zvi Mowshowitz · Don't Worry About the VaseOn Dwarkesh Patel's 2026 Podcast With Elon Musk and Other Recent Elon Musk Things
- 12 February 2026 · James Ball · TransformerWhy the AI industry can’t resist dirty on-site gas turbines
- 19 February 2025 · Zvi Mowshowitz · Don't Worry About the VaseGo Grok Yourself
Also mentioned in 17 entries
Referenced in passing — Elon Musk isn't the main subject of these.
- July 2026SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5
- June 2026OpenAI submits confidential S-1 to the SEC
- April 2026Microsoft and OpenAI sign amended, less-exclusive partnership
- March 2026Grok falsely verifies fabricated Iran missile-strike videos as authentic
- February 2026SpaceX and xAI merge into a combined $1.25 trillion entity
- January 2026xAI confirms Grok 5 training on Colossus 2, targets 6T-parameter MoE model
- November 2025Ilya Sutskever's deposition reveals details of the 2023 OpenAI board conflict
- July 2025Nonprofit Commission publishes its report to OpenAI's board
- May 2025Palisade Research finds OpenAI's o3 model sabotages its own shutdown mechanism
- March 2025OpenAI raises new funding at a reported $300bn valuation
- March 2025SoftBank leads a $40 billion round at a $300 billion valuation
- January 2025The Stargate Project announces $500 billion for AI infrastructure
- December 2024OpenAI proposes converting its for-profit arm into a Public Benefit Corporation
- October 2024Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024 finds AI increasingly used in nation-state influence and cyber operations
- September 2024Newsom vetoes California's SB 1047
- September 2024Reuters reports OpenAI plans to convert to a for-profit structure
- June 2024Apple announces Apple Intelligence with OpenAI inside