New challenges arise for Elon Musk's empire

Tech billionaire and CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk also started feeling the heat of the increasing competition in the artificial intelligence (AI) realm as Microsoft-backed OpenAI attempts to hire Tesla’s employees with considerable compensation.

Tesla — which is headed by Elon Musk — is offering increased compensation to its employees in the field of AI Engineering. 

Some of them went into the 52-year-old’s venture aimed at competing with ChatGPT maker OpenAI — which he helped co-found in 2015.

Musk — who is also the founder of a neurotechnology company Neuralink — termed the AI competition craziest talent war he has ever seen.

The world’s richest man founded his AI startup xAI last year in March and the current influx of employees from one company to another may spark governance issues within his commercial empire.

In a post on X, former Twitter, the owner of the social media platform wrote about one of his employees saying: "Ethan [Knight] was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them." 

He added: "They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases."

Competing the AI race, the billionaire launched his chatbot Grok in November.

"There are over 200 excellent engineers in the Tesla AI/Autonomy team," Musk wrote Wednesday in a post downplaying Knight’s leaving for xAI, adding that "Tesla’s pace of progress with autonomy is accelerating."

Musk offered to develop AI products in Tesla provided he is given the 25% voting control at Tesla

"As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon," OpenAI said in 2018 when the founder of SpaceX left the company.