Tesla Raising Pay for AI Engineers To Counter Poaching, Musk Says

Tesla (TSLA) is raising pay for its artificial intelligence (AI) engineers as it fends off poaching from the likes of OpenAI, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Elon Musk said in a series of posts on his social media platform X.

“The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!” Musk wrote, adding that “Tesla is increasing comp (contingent on progress milestones) of our AI engineering team.

He also said AI startup OpenAI has been “aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers,” and succeeding “in a few cases.”

Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI, the developer of the hit chatbot ChatGPT, but fell out with others at the startup and set up his own product, xAI, last year.

The plan to boost the pay of AI staff comes as the talent wars for people well-versed in the technology heats up among big tech firms like OpenAI backer Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) seeking to compete for market share. Tech firms like Google, meanwhile, are cutting jobs as they pivot to focus more on AI.

Musk’s comments came after The Information reported that Tesla machine-learning scientist Ethan Knight had joined xAI.

“Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them,” Musk wrote.

Musk previously said that he would rather build products outside of Tesla unless he has at least 25% voting control of the electric vehicle (EV) maker.

Tesla stock was up about 0.6% soon after the opening bell Thursday but was the biggest S&P 500 decliner the first three months of the year and has dropped about 32% year to date.