Elon Musk Asks xAI Staff To Justify Work With Performance Summaries Amid Layoffs; Details Here | Business News

Elon Musk has a history of demanding productivity updates across his companies.

Elon Musk has directed employees at his artificial intelligence company xAI to submit detailed one-page reports of their progress. According to an email seen by CNN, Musk has asked workers to outline what they achieved over the past four weeks and what they plan to deliver in the coming month.

According to CNN, the email written by Musk to staff on Tuesday afternoon read: “Send a one page summary of what you’ve accomplished in the past four weeks and what you intend to accomplish in the next four weeks. This is due by noon on Thursday.”

The directive comes ahead of a three-hour all-hands meeting scheduled for Wednesday, as xAI navigates an unsettled period marked by internal shake-ups and staff cuts.

A familiar Musk playbook

This approach is not new for Musk, who has a history of demanding productivity updates across his companies. In 2024, he asked X (formerly Twitter) employees for regular monthly and yearly contribution summaries to help decide stock and option awards. During his brief advisory role with the Department of Government Efficiencies, he pushed federal employees to file weekly accomplishment lists, warning that failing to respond would be treated as resignation. The plan was later abandoned after agencies raised security concerns.

Musk’s unconventional methods go back further. When he took over Twitter in 2022, he famously instructed developers to print out the code they had written, only to later tell them to shred the documents.

Layoffs and hiring shifts

The latest request at xAI lands in the middle of a rocky stretch for the start-up. Business Insider reported last week that the company laid off more than 500 members of its data annotation unit, the team responsible for training Grok, xAI’s AI chatbot. These employees were key to improving Grok’s reliability by rating responses and tagging content.

Although management told staff in an all-hands meeting that the layoffs were finished, further job cuts followed within hours. At the same time, the company announced fresh hiring plans focused on specialised AI tutors in fields ranging from science and finance to medicine — and even roles centred on “memes and headline commentary”. Pay scales for these new jobs have been lifted significantly, from $35-65 per hour to $45-100 per hour, depending on the expertise required.