Musk's xAI Hiring Credit Experts, Bankers To Teach Grok Finance

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is looking to hire bankers and private credit lenders to make its Grok chatbot better at finance strategy, joining rival AI firms in pushing software for investing professionals.

xAI is actively recruiting Wall Street bankers, portfolio managers, traders and credit analysts for its data annotation teams that train Grok, according to a series of job postings on its website. These experts are expected to teach the AI system to think through financial modeling, including leveraged loan syndication, distressed investing and niche bonds such as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized loan obligations.

The company is also hiring financial experts in the crypto and equity markets, the postings show.

The top AI developers have increasingly focused on convincing more business professionals to pay up for their software, with multiple startups specifically eyeing the financial sector. OpenAI and Anthropic PBC have released tools meant to streamline market analysis, investment memos and other work. Those moves have spooked investors in legacy software providers that some fear may be rendered obsolete.

xAI, which merged with Musk's SpaceX last month, is generally viewed as lagging competitors in signing up business customers. To date, much of xAI's revenue has come from deals with Musk's other ventures, including Tesla Inc. and SpaceX.

Musk's AI company is rebuilding its business strategy after a turbulent start to the year, during which it lost many staffers, including much of its founding team, and faced a global uproar over Grok generating non-consensual explicit images.

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Last week, Musk hired two senior employees from Cursor, a leading AI coding startup that is in fundraising discussions at a $50 billion valuation. Musk admitted at a recent conference that xAI is behind on coding, a feature that has been a key revenue driver for OpenAI and Anthropic.

Musk has also recently touted Grok's ability to “help with your taxes,” after xAI recruited accountants to help train Grok.

xAI has been relying on AI tutors, as staffers that train Grok are called, to feed data into the chatbot and tweak its responses. Diego Pasini, a recent high school graduate who's been at the company for a little over a year, leads the tutors, according to a staff meeting last month.

“One of the bottlenecks is training data,” Pasini said at the time. Grok relies heavily on data from Musk's social network, X.

xAI is focusing much of its AI tutor hiring on credit markets, which are under pressure as private credit funds face redemptions and other challenges.