Elon Musk says he’s boosting Tesla pay to stop OpenAI from poaching

Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said the automaker has been boosting pay for artificial intelligence engineers as it faces a war over talent.

“Tesla is increasing comp (contingent on progress milestones) of our AI engineering team,” he posted on his X social media site, formerly Twitter. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has been “aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases,” he said.

Musk was responding to an Information report about Tesla AI scientist Ethan Knight leaving the car company to join Musk’s xAI startup. “Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them,” Musk said.

Musk, the world’s third-richest person, helped start OpenAI before having a falling-out with the company. He’s now approaching AI from multiple angles — both within Tesla, where it’s being used to help develop self-driving features, and at his xAI startup.

“There are over 200 excellent engineers in the Tesla AI/Autonomy team,” he said on X. “Tesla’s pace of progress with autonomy is accelerating. The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!”