Elon Musk’s xAI recently offered employees payments of $420 to hand over their completed tax returns for use in training Grok, according to a new report from Bloomberg. But that same report notes employees haven’t seen a penny of that promised cash. And it’s not clear when it’s coming.
Grok has been lagging in the AI chatbot race, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s CoPilot, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini leading in widespread adoption in the U.S. market. Musk has been doing everything he can to get more people to use Grok, pushing it on X users and shoring up government contracts through his ties with the Trump regime.
xAI was scrambling to improve Grok before the April 15 tax deadline, according to Bloomberg, and offered employees $420 for their tax return information. That number is a reference to marijuana, of course, and Musk makes that “joke” frequently since he has the same sense of humor as a 15-year-old boy.
Bloomberg reports that xAI expanded the call for volunteers beyond employees and asked that friends and family who’d used an accountant to file their taxes also submit their information for payment. The request included supporting documentation, which would theoretically allow Grok to put together all sorts of data points. The idea is that Grok will learn from these tax returns and become more accurate when a user asks for their own taxes to be completed by the chatbot.
But employees weren’t just getting cash. They were also going to get access to X Money, a payments platform that’s been in the works for some time. According to Bloomberg, employees who’ve asked about the $420 payments have been told that “the manager in charge of the program is no longer working there.”
Grok has had a tumultuous history as arguably the most controversial of the major AI chatbots. And it’s struggling to stay relevant as companies seek to make AI a much more integrated part of every American’s daily life.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is previewing a personal finance feature for U.S.-based Pro users that allows people to connect various financial accounts. The idea is to allow users to analyze things like their spending patterns and plan for the future. OpenAI assures users that everything about the process is secure, but obviously, when it comes to such sensitive information, people are naturally skeptical.
In many ways, Musk has always been trying to play catch-up with the other AI companies. Remember when he signed that letter in March 2023, calling for a moratorium on AI development for six months, positioning the idea as a way to ensure safety? As we later learned, Musk spent that time starting his own AI company. All he wanted was to slow everyone else down so he could jump ahead. He still hasn’t accomplished that, three years later, but he’s going to keep trying, especially now that he’s brought xAI under the SpaceX umbrella and is about to take the company public.
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