Ever had a boss promise to pay you for work done only for them to stiff you? That’s something that xAI staff are facing right now, where according to a recent Bloomberg report, xAI CEO Elon Musk apparently owes a bunch of employees $420.
Musk reportedly owes employees for data
For those unfamiliar, xAI is an AI company that Musk created after leaving OpenAI. Now, AI works best when it is being trained with all kinds of data. This allows it to make inferences and become more knowledgeable, much like humans. Now, the report claims that in order to train xAI’s model, Grok, Musk promised employees he would pay them $420 each if they were to offer up their personal tax returns. This data would be used for training purposes.
However, the report claims that Musk still owes his employees, as those payments have yet to take place. It seems that turning to AI to help file taxes is something many people are doing, but most users turn to AI models like ChatGPT or Claude, instead of Grok. To combat that, Musk tried to incentivize employees to hand over personal tax data to train Grok so that it would be smarter when it came to tax filing requests.
So, when some staff took up the offer, which included handing over completed tax filings and supporting documents, those payments never arrived. When they asked about it, they were told that the manager in charge of the program had left.
A lawsuit waiting to happen?
We have to say, $420 for personal data doesn’t sound like a lot of money. However, given the current economic climate, a few hundred extra bucks could come in handy. So far, it doesn’t look like employees will sue Musk or xAI over it, but it could happen, especially if there’s proof that there was a promised payment of $420.
If that happens, it wouldn’t be the first time Musk has faced a lawsuit. Back in 2023, after Musk took over Twitter, employees sued the company over alleged unpaid severance payments. If Musk wants to avoid another similar situation, he should just cough up the cash. After all, given his wealth, it’s probably not worth that much to him anyway.
The post Musk Promised xAI Employees $420 for Their Tax Returns and Then Just… Didn’t Pay appeared first on Android Headlines.
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