Musk has started replacing employees with Grok! The worst-hit department has laid off 90% of its staff

Musk has started to replace his employees with AI!

This time, he has turned his knife towards X (formerly Twitter) — replacing X employees with Grok.

According to The Information, last month two insiders revealed to them that Musk fired half of the engineering team at X responsible for combating spam, influence operations, illegal content, and other trust and safety issues.

This team had already been reduced to fewer than 20 members before this round of layoffs, while when Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, the team size was over 100.

From over 100 people to fewer than 10, it is evident how deep and ruthless Musk's layoffs have been.

In fact, if we look back at a tweet Musk posted in mid-October, the news of these layoffs is not surprising.

At that time, Musk stated that he would completely remove X's heuristic recommendation algorithm in the coming weeks, with Grok taking over, automatically matching user interests by reading and watching all content. With the algorithm fully handed over to AI, the algorithm engineers and related supporters behind it naturally face unemployment.

Aside from the X-related events, Musk has many other plans in motion. For example, in August this year, he directly challenged Microsoft by establishing Macrohard, claiming to redo Microsoft products using AI.

When we put all these things together, Musk's intentions become clear —

Replace human labor with AI, and automate traditional engineering.

In other words, the big boss Musk has now set his sights on AI as his "sword of authority."

Introducing Twin New Executives

To achieve the goal of transforming X with Grok, Musk has handed this sword to two twin new executives from xAI —

33-year-old Dima and Ievgin Soboliev, who are from Ukraine.

According to previous reports from Wired, after OpenAI poached xAI's former engineering leads Uday Ruddarraju and Mike Dalton, these twin brothers became top engineers at xAI and report directly to Musk.

(Note: x and xAI officially merged in March this year, but the team operates relatively independently.) Dima in the above image studied applied mathematics at Kharkiv National University and went to work in Silicon Valley after graduation He initially joined Facebook (now Meta), then quickly moved to Google, cloud-native database company SingleStore, international cross-border e-commerce platform Joom, and the world's top proprietary quantitative trading firm Jump Trading Group.

Starting in 2017, he joined the machine learning startup Laserlike, which was later acquired by Apple.

It was through this acquisition that, from 2018 to 2024, he worked at Apple on search-related tasks. He then left Apple to join OpenAI, but left within a year to join xAI.

Ievgin Soboliev, after completing his studies in applied mathematics at Kharkiv National University, also went to Silicon Valley.

He initially joined the once well-known programmatic advertising technology company Rocket Fuel Inc.

Later, possibly influenced by Dima, he went to Meta to work on advertising machine learning, and then worked at Apple from 2022 to 2025.

According to insiders, this summer, the two brothers joined xAI around the same time. They often work together, and colleagues directly refer to them as "the twins."

Moreover, the two brothers have been promoting a typical "Musk model" within X—

They require engineers to work long hours in the office, including weekends; eradicate inefficiencies; and quickly eliminate positions they deem unnecessary.

It is currently unclear how many more engineers X may lay off. Insiders say that X still has at least another 100 engineers responsible for different parts of the work.

What exactly does Musk want to do?

As mentioned at the beginning, this round of layoffs is part of Musk's step to "replace human labor with AI and automate traditional engineering."

He has publicly stated that he hopes to make X's algorithms "fully AI-driven" and allow users to adjust the content displayed in their information feeds by querying xAI's Grok chatbot.

This update has directly elevated Grok from a ruthless summarizing machine Robert, and Wikipedia on X, to the overseer of X.

Now Grok is everywhere on X, and there will be more Grok in the future.

At the same time, he is also advancing the "Macrohard plan"—to automate software development with AI. He stated:

Macrohard is a purely AI software company.

In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not produce any physical hardware, it should be possible to fully simulate them with AI.

From the trademark registration content of Macrohard, we can extract the following key points:

• Downloadable software for generating artificial intelligence voice and text
• AI tools for writing code, designing, and running video games
• Image, video, and language understanding systems

In short, Musk intends to use AI to redo what Microsoft once did.

Moreover, according to Musk himself, he has painted the slogan with Macrohard on the roof of xAI's largest data center in Memphis.

It is evident that whether through layoffs or the Macrohard plan, Musk is striving to transform his companies with AI.

However, the somewhat radical AI supremacy strategy also brings risks that Musk cannot ignore.

The most direct contradiction lies in the "asymmetry of power and responsibility" between the team responsible for platform safety and the AI system generating content.

The team is responsible for cleaning up violations but has no control over what Grok will generate, which makes them quite passive.

Furthermore, due to the independence of the teams after the merger of X and xAI, while the safety team is cleaning up harmful content generated by Grok, the xAI team within the same company may be training Grok to become more "creative"—

This inconsistency in internal goals can easily lead to a vacuum of responsibility regarding safety issues.

Additionally, Musk's layoff plan has also impacted some key projects. For years, Musk has hoped to launch a payment service called "X Money" on X, but the company has failed to gain support from some key state regulatory agencies, hindering this plan.

It is reported that an important consideration for financial regulators is whether the payment company has stable leadership and enough staff to support customers and combat fraud.

The X Money team has faced frequent personnel turnover over the past year.

In summary, Musk's AI transformation plan, while cutting human costs, is also undermining the foundation of platform safety and the future of core business.

The double-edged sword of AI is already evident.

One More Thing

Speaking of layoffs, Musk also made significant cuts to the xAI team in September this year.

xAI is the AI startup founded by Musk in 2023, with its main product being the Grok model, and the team laid off in September was the data annotation team that helped train the Grok model According to unofficial statistics, at that time, more than 500 employees (about one-third of the data annotation team) were notified to pack up and leave.

And guess what? Almost all of those who remained were Chinese.

At that time, a group photo of the xAI team went viral on social media because the photo was almost entirely composed of East Asian faces.

Shortly after the release of Grok 4, an employee who claimed to be the "only white participant in the Grok project" posted on X:

Today I was fired by @X, I am the only white person involved in the @grok project...

Although the authenticity of this tweet has not been confirmed, it indirectly suggests that Old Ma may indeed have a preference for Chinese people (not really).

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