Elon Musk brutally calls out xAI employee over one word in job ad

If you ever thought of working for Elon Musk at his AI leading company xAI, then you might also need to know that this one word is off limits when it comes to the role they’re hiring for.

The generative AI Grok 4, created by xAI has been causing a stir with its no-nonsense responses and discriminatory statements online.

As the leader of the company, this has gotten Elon Musk into plenty of trouble, namely when it became obsessed with white genocide, and then went on to praise Adolf Hitler.

While Musk said it was ‘tricked’ to share those views on Hitler, there’s some concerns there that need to be addressed.

To do so, they’d need to recruit more AI engineers…but make sure that’s the name you call the job.

Otherwise, you’ll get in hot water.

As Musk is now recruiting for a specialist role at xAI after selling X to xAI for a whopping $45 billion, it seems that he’s putting a lot of investment into his artificial intelligence chatbot.

As reported by Business Insider, the xAI career portal posted a job listing titled, "Fullstack Engineer – Waifus”, and you can apply to it if you want to.

Or, you could apply to its AI Engineer role too, but if you call it a ‘researcher’ role, like many other companies do, Musk might call you out in public.

The billionaire publicly chastised one of his own employees for using the word on ‘researcher’ on Tuesday 29 July, after they said they were “looking for researchers and engineers for scaling up our rl [reinforcement learning] environments with user feedback and preference in the loop”.

Musk hit back that “there are only engineers” and that “researcher is a relic term from academia”.

He went on to say: “This false nomenclature of ‘researcher’ and ‘engineer’, which is a thinly-masked way of describing a two-tier engineering system, is being deleted from @xAI today.

“SpaceX does more meaningful, cutting-edge “research” on the advancement of rockets and satellites than all the academic university labs on Earth combined. But we don’t use the pretentious, low-accountability term ‘researcher’.”

Damn, Musk.

According to the average salary for the AI engineer role in Palo Alto in California, it can range anywhere from $180,000 to $440,000, so maybe calling it ‘engineer’ instead of ‘researcher’ is worth the hassle?

The job description reads for it: “As an AI Engineer & Researcher - Reasoning Post-training at xAI, you will drive the evolution of our AI models' reasoning capabilities through inventive post-training approaches, embracing a broad scope that spans from conceptual exploration to practical implementation.

“This role demands a blend of technical depth and boundless creativity, where you'll refine pre-trained models to excel in logical inference, multi-step problem-solving, and adaptive thinking—without delving into initial training phases.

“By devising unconventional techniques and fostering creative breakthroughs, you'll help our AI systems tackle complex, real-world challenges with unprecedented intelligence and reliability, collaborating across teams to turn bold ideas into transformative enhancements.”

It’s a lot to do, but it’s surely worth it for the pay.

Even if Musk will call you out for misspeaking.