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Musk's secret? Elite human capital.
I still can't get over this picture of the Grok 3 team that built arguably the world's best AI in record time. Notice anything?
Exclusively Indian, East Asian, and White.
100% male.
Everyone, or almost everyone, under 40.
No suits.
This is what extreme meritocracy looks like in an intellectual environment. Elon's secret sauce is giving geniuses the space to do genius things with performance as the only metric.
Obviously this can't work for every company. The number of genius workaholics is too small. But Elon found a group of people who were comically undervalued by the market and let them cook.
Too bad in 10 years, the corporate grind will have eaten most of those people. Two or three will make the transition to management. About the same will try to found startups of their own, maybe one ending up destroyed in a lawsuit with Musk. The rest will find the company they work for sets the minimum standard at their highest previous achievement, and added a bunch of corporate BS on top to make that harder to achieve, and will end up burning out in the bit mines.
Aren't they making $500k-1m/y total comp? Set for life even if they do get ground up after ten years.
Everything I've seen is that they make about $300k TC in the Bay, which isn't the insane salary you think it is, with that cost of living.
Unlikely. When you join early a company that then becomes highly successful, the equity grant you get is going to the moon. So yeah, maybe they got offered $300k TC when they joined, but that $300k is worth much more after a year or two.
I get how vested options work, I'm in tech. xAI is private right? It could be that Elon is offering stock but we don't know that. Until they IPO their fake money is worth literally nothing. If so, then they are likely making far less than the 300k TC. I pulled the xAI from some leaked memo about the Lawsuit between xAI and OpenAI, it didn't include the equity split though (can't find it now rip).
However this says 188k - 440k, I image the 440k is for for Senior and Staff engineers, Like 2-3 on that whole team, afterall someone needs to be the junior, and SWE2/MLE2s https://cybernews.com/news/musks-x-ai-jobs-salaries-/
You clearly don't actually understand how equity works. It obviously is worth something, because investors are paying billions of dollars for it. Being public or private only has indirect effect on how much stock is worth.
Going public provides easy liquidity, which is good, especially to small stockholders, but private companies of the size we are talking about also usually provide liquidity options to stockholders. SpaceX, for example, had a tender offer a couple months ago. This event allows individual SpaceX stock holders to sell their holdings to institutional investors, in case you don't understand what that is.
To put it in more concrete terms: I'd happily go to any of these X AI employees, and buy whatever they vest in a year for $10,000. This offer establishes that their stock is worth something. (I'm not just making a point, this offer is 100% serious: if you work for X AI, feel free to DM me, I'm open to negotiations even).
These figures only include cash compensation, and they are a very reasonable range for cash part of the comp for between junior and staff levels.
There are around 40 people in the photo. I bet you that at least 10 of them are seniors or above.
Trust me I do, the real discrepancy is that we have different risk appetites. But please keep talking down to me.
I linked twitter salaries in the above thread. Everything in the Bay is talked about in the TC range because it sounds more impressive. If the post-Elon twitter salaries are any benchmark, then the 118-440k are TC as well. That means probably about 50% is in equity.
Anyone who worked for xAI would be a fool to take this offer because you are massively lowballing them. If they vest over 3 years as is typical, that 150k vested would be 50k a year. They would be a fool to sell it to you at 10k, Realistically based on how much you value it they would be better charging you 3x-5x the price since you clearly think its worth it. Would you cough up 150k-250k cash for 50k vested stock in xAI? You do after all think it is worth near half a million+, that would be quite the steal for you...
You made me go back and count, there are 26 people visible in that photo. If we assume a typical corporate structure of Junior, Engineer II, Senior, Staff. The general ratio is a mix of 1-3 Juniors/IIs per Senior, and 1-2 Seniors per Staff. I'd say there is 4-6 Seniors and 2-4 Staff Engineers.
You say:
You also say:
How can I be lowballing them when their stock is literally worthless? Can you make up your mind?
No, you quoted an article that was citing figures from job postings. Those figures are not there to sound impressive, they’re there to satisfy legal requirements California imposes on job postings.
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