Elon Musk’s xAI asked employees earlier this year to submit their own tax returns as training data for the Grok chatbot, offering a $420 incentive payment. Two months later, those payments have still not materialized.
xAI, which is undergoing a broad restructuring, proposed to employees to collect more data that could improve Grok’s tax capabilities before the April 15 U.S. tax filing deadline, according to internal conversations seen by Bloomberg News. Americans were already turning to rival chatbots, such as Claude, from Anthropic, and ChatGPT, from OpenAI, to handle accounting tasks, and xAI was racing to compete for a share of that market.
In March, xAI managers offered cash payments in exchange for complete tax returns, according to internal messages. Volunteers needed to submit the finalized return, plus supporting documents and materials from this or the previous year, records show. In exchange, they were promised early access to X Money — the payments platform that Musk is incorporating into the X social network — and a payment of US$420, a number associated with the marijuana that Musk frequently uses in public references.
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Shortly thereafter, the call for volunteers was expanded to include family and friends of employees who had used an accountant, not AI, to prepare their returns. They were also promised a payment. xAI also looked at the possibility of hiring accountants and data annotators to train Grok on tax issues, and Musk encouraged online users to get larger refunds using the chatbot.
Two months after handing over their personal financial details, the bonus had still not been paid, internal conversations show. Some employees who asked about payment were told that the manager responsible for the program no longer worked at the company, according to people familiar with the matter. An xAI spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
The unfulfilled payment promise dealt another blow to morale within xAI, which has already undergone layoffs and several management changes since the beginning of the year. Musk works at a fast pace to improve the company’s business and products before the IPO of SpaceX, which currently owns xAI, scheduled for later this year. xAI is also trying to catch up to competitors like Anthropic, which have already developed chatbots for specific uses like financial modeling.
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To try to keep up, Musk has turned to employees in search of data, closed agreements with other companies — such as Cursor, in the code area — and relied on the leadership of SpaceX itself for management. But constant changes and high staff turnover have left initiatives like the payment for tax data program without an owner.
This isn’t the first time Musk has turned to employee labor for valuable training data. At the end of last year, xAI managers encouraged employees to provide data to a software project known as Macrohard — a play on Microsoft’s name — which aims to use AI to replicate an entire company with artificial agents. According to people with knowledge of the project, employees were promised a 20% bonus if they recorded their screens and fed Grok their activities. Those payments were eventually made, but they also took time to process, the sources said.
Macrohard is now a joint venture with Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the automaker’s vice president of software, is hiring staff for the project.
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