Elon Musk fired off a classic productivity edict on Tuesday — xAI staff were ordered to submit a one-page summary of what they’d done in the past four weeks and what they’ll do in the next four, with a hard noon deadline Thursday — a move that has become his management signature across companies.
Elon Musk sent a message to xAI employees on Tuesday afternoon asking everyone to produce a one-page summary detailing what they’d achieved in the past four weeks and what they plan to do in the coming four.
He gave a firm deadline: those one-page reports must be turned in by noon on Thursday, according to a copy of the email shared with CNN. xAI did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
Musk has a history of demanding this kind of accountability from staff at companies and agencies he’s run.
In August 2024, for instance, Musk emailed all X employees asking for a one-page summary of contributions over the last month and the past year — ostensibly to make stock and option awards proportionate to likely future contributions — a note first reported by The Verge.
When Musk was advising the White House and the Office of Government Efficiencies, he likewise sent mass requests for federal employees to list weekly accomplishments, even suggesting that not replying would be treated as a resignation. That approach sparked warnings in some sensitive agencies not to respond, and the Office of Personnel Management later clarified responses were voluntary; the program was eventually scrapped.
After buying Twitter in 2022, Musk also at one point told engineers to print out lines of code they had written — and then reportedly told them to shred the prints, another of his well-known management theatrics.
It’s not clear how xAI will use the summaries. The company has scheduled a three-hour all-hands meeting on Wednesday, according to a source familiar with the plans. Last week, Business Insider reported that xAI had cut hundreds of workers from its data annotation team, including “AI tutors” who trained the Grok chatbot.
xAI is a relatively new player in the booming AI market and makes Grok, a controversial chatbot that’s tied into the X social network. Musk has publicly tweaked Grok’s responses when they’ve run counter to his views; at times Grok has produced racist, antisemitic and other problematic replies that the company later said it fixed. The firm’s image-generation tools are also less restrictive on adult content than some rivals like OpenAI or Google.
Still, Grok has attracted notable fans — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang among them.
Huang told CNN in the U.K. that his relationship with Musk is strong and focused on collaboration and engineering. He praised Musk as an excellent engineer who builds things properly, and said not to confuse Musk’s personality with his technical skill. Huang added he uses Grok frequently — almost daily — and thinks it has a real shot at becoming a leader in AI.
