Elon Musk's AI Company Just Sacked an Engineer for Posting About Its Upcoming AI Model

Broke or Woke?

An "anti-woke" AI company founded by chronic poster Elon Musk has forced one of its engineers to resign for, essentially, posting.

That engineer, Benjamin De Kraker, said in a lengthy X post that he'd been told he needed to either delete a post ranking the still-unreleased model lower than OpenAI's offering for writing code — or face termination.

"After reviewing everything and thinking a lot, I've decided that I'm not going to delete the post," the longtime AI dev said, "which is very clearly a harmless personal opinion."

As De Kraker explained, xAI claimed that it asked the engineer to delete his post because he'd publicly referenced the forthcoming model — despite Musk announcing it on the same platform more than a month prior.

"Their official demand said that even writing 'Grok 3 - TBD' is somehow 'confidential information,'" he wrote. "This is absolutely absurd, since it's repeatedly been acknowledged by the company and its famous CEO."

Reading between the lines, however, it seems the firing threat may have been leveled because he had been honest about Grok 3's current capabilities when stacking it up against OpenAI and others.

"Are they mad that my clearly-labeled opinion didn't guess that the still-unreleased Grok 3 will be higher? Maybe. Probably," he wrote. "Again, maybe it is at the top, I genuinely don't know. That's why it says 'to be determined.'"

Despite still hoping the poster-in-chief and his AI company "win," De Kraker said it was "very disappointing" that a company purporting to champion free speech "would try to fire a low-level employee over a clearly-labeled opinion that contains absolutely nothing controversial."

"But here we are," he wrote.

As if the situation wasn't already bizarre enough, Musk made it all the stranger by wading into the debate himself.

"That's weird," the X owner replied. In response, De Kraker agreed that it was, indeed, "pretty weird."

Despite that acknowledgment from the world's richest poster, there has been no further update about De Kraker's case, suggesting that Musk didn't maneuver to get him his job back (or, perhaps, that the engineer refused).

We can't say we're exactly surprised, but it's definitely another bit of evidence that the gastrointestinally-challenged billionaire's avowed "free speech absolutism" seldom holds up in practice.

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