Elon Musk Pushes xAI to Build Autonomous AI Agents to Run Companies

Elon Musk has once again set an audacious vision for the future of artificial intelligence — one where AI agents don’t just assist businesses but potentially run them.

In a recent company-wide meeting at xAI, Musk outlined a sweeping reorganisation of the AI startup, underscoring his belief that speed — not size — will determine leadership in the global AI race. The internal meeting, later shared publicly on X, followed the departure of two xAI co-founders, Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu. Their exits add to a growing list of early team members who have stepped away since the company’s launch in 2023, including Kyle Kosic, Igor Babuschkin and Christian Szegedy. Greg Yang also scaled back his involvement after a health diagnosis.

While acknowledging these leadership changes, Musk expressed gratitude toward those who left and shifted focus to the company’s next chapter.

At the heart of xAI’s restructuring is a streamlined organisational model built around four major divisions. The first centres on Grok, the company’s chatbot and voice assistant platform. The second focuses on coding technologies. The third, called Imagine, is dedicated to AI-driven video generation. The fourth — and perhaps most ambitious — is a newly formed division named Macrohard.

Macrohard is designed to develop AI agents capable of autonomously managing businesses. Instead of functioning merely as conversational tools, these systems would operate independently, overseeing workflows, making decisions and potentially running entire organisations — including Musk’s own companies.

Musk emphasised urgency during the meeting. “What matters is velocity and acceleration,” he said. “If you are moving faster, you will be the leader.” His remarks reflect the intense competitive pressure within the AI industry, where companies are racing to build more powerful and efficient models.

Macrohard will be led by founding member Toby Pohlen. Meanwhile, Aman Madaan, who joined xAI last year, heads the Grok chatbot and voice division. Highlighting the team’s rapid progress, Madaan said, “We had nothing, but in six months we developed it from scratch,” referring to Grok’s voice capabilities.

Other leadership roles have also been clarified. Manuel Kroiss will oversee coding projects, while Guodong Zhang will lead the Imagine video-generation unit. Musk believes real-time video understanding and generation will define the next frontier of AI innovation. “Most of the AI computing is gonna be understanding real-time video generation,” he said. “And we expect to be leaders in that.”

The restructuring coincides with xAI’s merger with SpaceX, reportedly valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. The move is expected to provide greater access to computational resources and infrastructure, critical for training advanced AI systems.

Musk’s ambitions, however, extend far beyond Earth. During the meeting, he floated the idea of building a factory on the Moon to manufacture AI satellites. These satellites would increase computing capacity and could be launched using a “mass driver” system in space. “You have to go to the moon,” Musk said, suggesting that unprecedented computational scale will be essential for AI dominance. “It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about, but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”

While details remain speculative, Musk’s message was clear: in the AI race, acceleration is everything — and he intends for xAI to lead it.