A post shared by Twitter user has reignited concerns over employee retention at Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter). A Twitter user called Varunaram Ganesh recently shared a screenshot of an employee announcing their departure from xAI just six months after joining. In the post shared the employee claimed that the company’s attrition rate “seems to be at least 50%” within the year.The post shared on X gained a lot of traction and another user called @satyanutella also shared Ganesh’s post and wrote, “My point was: You are no longer attracting “top talent.” Everyone knows that the best AI researchers are not at xAI. Top talent need a honourable vision. Not “Be a soldier in my Empire, let’s make retard grok and be edgy in Twitter”.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to the attrition rate claim
The now viral post also got the attention of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Responding to the post Musk said there have been very few departures that the company regret. “There are very few regretted departures. And we are accelerating faster than any other AI organization on Earth, despite being a much smaller team,” wrote Musk.This debate about the attrition rate comes amid reports that xAI is spending nearly $1 billion per month to scale its AI capabilities. The company reportedly burned through $7.8 billion in the first nine months of last year, while generating just $107 million in revenue. In the September quarter alone, xAI posted a $1.46 billion loss, raising questions about sustainability and internal stability.While Musk downplayed the issue, past reports suggest that xAI has faced significant workforce changes. In 2025, the company laid off over 500 data annotation workers as it pivoted toward specialist tutors for its AI model, Grok. One of the most high-profile exits was CFO Mike Liberatore, who left after just three months at the startup.
