xAI in Internal Crisis: Elon Musk Suggests a Complete Rebuild
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence start-up is weathering a period of turbulence marked by the departure of co-founders and controversies surrounding its Grok chatbot. The entrepreneur acknowledges that the company must be deeply reorganized.
Less than six weeks after the merger between SpaceX and xAI in a deal worth $1.25 trillion, Elon Musk admitted that the artificial intelligence start-up needed to be "rebuilt from the ground up." He announced this via the social network X following a series of departures among the company's co-founders, notably Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang. These exits follow those of Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Toby Pohlen in recent months. Out of the founding members present at the creation of xAI in 2023, only two now remain alongside Musk.
This instability comes as SpaceX prepares for a potentially historic IPO. In the recently announced merger, SpaceX was valued at $1 trillion and xAI at $250bn. Meanwhile, the company is recruiting new engineers, including Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg from the start-up Cursor, while simultaneously cutting positions after observing the rapid progress of programming tools developed by OpenAI and Anthropic. Elon Musk also acknowledged that some talented candidates had been overlooked during recruitment and said that he is reviewing old applications to re-establish contact with them.
xAI is also facing several controversies related to its chatbot and image generator Grok, which has been accused of allowing the creation of non-consensual sexual images from real photos. Despite these controversies, the company has secured contracts with US government agencies and continues its investments in energy and data infrastructure, particularly around Memphis. Tesla is collaborating closely with xAI by integrating Grok into its vehicles and providing energy storage systems designed to power the company's data centers.
Tesla, Inc. designs, builds, and sells electric vehicles. Net sales break down by activity as follows:
- sale of automotive vehicles (69.4%);
- sale of energy generation and storage systems (13.5%);
- services (13.2%): primarily maintenance and repair services. The group also develops sale of power train assembly components for electric vehicles activity;
- automotive credits (2.1%);
- automotive leasing (1.8%).
At the end of 2025, the group had 8 manufacturing sites located in the United States (5), China (2) and Germany.
Net sales are distributed geographically as follows: the United States (50.2%), China (22.1%) and other (27.7%).
This super rating is the result of a weighted average of the rankings based on the following ratings: Global Valuation (Composite), EPS Revisions (4 months), and Visibility (Composite). We recommend that you carefully review the associated descriptions.
Investor
Investor
This super composite rating is the result of a weighted average of the rankings based on the following ratings: Fundamentals (Composite), Global Valuation (Composite), EPS Revisions (1 year), and Visibility (Composite). We recommend that you carefully review the associated descriptions.
Global
Global
This composite rating is the result of an average of the rankings based on the following ratings: Fundamentals (Composite), Valuation (Composite), Financial Estimates Revisions (Composite), Consensus (Composite), and Visibility (Composite). The company must be covered by at least 4 of these 5 ratings for the calculation to be performed. We recommend that you carefully review the associated descriptions.
Quality
Quality
This composite rating is the result of an average of the rankings based on the following ratings: Capital Efficiency (Composite), Quality of Financial Reporting (Composite), and Financial Health (Composite). The company must be covered by at least 2 of these 3 ratings for the calculation to be performed. We recommend that you carefully review the associated descriptions.
ESG MSCI
ESG MSCI
The MSCI ESG score assesses a company’s environmental, social, and governance practices relative to its industry peers. Companies are rated from CCC (laggard) to AAA (leader). This rating helps investors incorporate sustainability risks and opportunities into their investment decisions.
