Elon Musk publicly took a dump on one of his underlings for the unthinkable crime of using the word “researcher.”<\/p>\n
At the receiving end of his boss’s wrath was Aditya Gupta, an employee at Musk’s AI startup xAI. “We at [xAI] are looking for researchers and engineers,” Gupta tweeted<\/a> Tuesday, with a link to a job posting.<\/p>\n Apparently having gotten up on the wrong side of bed, Musk took extreme umbrage with this benign statement of fact.<\/p>\n “This false nomenclature of ‘researcher’ and ‘engineer’, which is a thinly-masked way of describing a two-tier engineering system, is being deleted from @xAI today,” he fumed in a quote tweet<\/a>. “There are only engineers. Researcher is a relic term from academia.”<\/p>\n The billionaire multi-hyphenate wouldn’t conclude before bloviating about how awesome his companies are.<\/p>\n “SpaceX does more meaningful, cutting-edge ‘research’ on the advancement of rockets and satellites than all the academic university labs on Earth combined,” Musk added. “But we don’t use the pretentious, low-accountability term ‘researcher’.”<\/p>\n “Engineer,” he wrote in a final sentence, at no point acknowledging the employee he was making an example of.<\/p>\n This was clearly an impulsive decision by Musk. For one, the “careers<\/a>” section of the xAI website still reads: “We are a team of AI researchers and engineers on a mission to build AI systems…”\u00a0<\/p>\n In the job posting<\/a>, the description also refers to the role as an “AI engineer and researcher.” The division is labelled as “engineering & research.” The job asks for someone with a “background in AI research.”\u00a0<\/p>\n There is, in sum, a lot of “research” involved with this job, which Musk now insists is absolutely not a researcher position. So what did Gupta do wrong here, exactly? Was he supposed to know that invoking the specter of “researchers” was some kind of cardinal sin?<\/p>\n Of course, it’s no secret that Musk can be a jerk to his employees. He was notorious for his rage firings<\/a> at his automaker Tesla, and one former engineer there alleged that he threatened to deport<\/a> her entire team for pointing out a serious safety flaw with one of his cars.<\/p>\n This isn’t even the first time Musk has tried to publicly humiliate an employee, either. Following his takeover of X, formerly Twitter, Musk mocked a now ex-employee named Haraldur Thorleifsson for his disability<\/a>, accusing him of using his muscular dystrophy diagnosis to get out of work. Following backlash, Musk eventually apologized<\/a> to Thorleifsson and deleted some of his remarks.<\/p>\n As for Gupta, he opted to take it all on the chin (and probably to keep his job). “Correction: looking for solid engineers,” he wrote<\/a>, after Musk’s upbraiding.<\/p>\n