{"id":680566,"date":"2026-05-19T10:13:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T10:13:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/680566\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T10:13:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T10:13:17","slug":"elon-musk-offered-to-pay-employees-for-their-tax-returns-you-can-probably-guess-what-happened-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/680566\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk Offered to Pay Employees for Their Tax Returns, You Can Probably Guess What Happened Next"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk\u2019s xAI recently offered employees payments of $420 to hand over their completed tax returns for use in training Grok, according to a new report from Bloomberg<\/a>. But that same report notes employees haven\u2019t seen a penny of that promised cash. And it\u2019s not clear when it\u2019s coming.<\/p>\n

Grok has been lagging in the AI chatbot race, with OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, Microsoft\u2019s CoPilot, Anthropic\u2019s Claude, and Google\u2019s Gemini leading in widespread adoption in the U.S. market. Musk has been doing everything he can to get more people to use Grok, pushing it on X users and shoring up government contracts<\/a> through his ties with the Trump regime.<\/p>\n

xAI was scrambling to improve Grok before the April 15 tax deadline, according to Bloomberg, and offered employees $420 for their tax return information. That number is a reference to marijuana, of course, and Musk makes that \u201cjoke\u201d frequently since he has the same sense of humor as a 15-year-old boy.<\/p>\n

Bloomberg reports that xAI expanded the call for volunteers beyond employees and asked that friends and family who\u2019d used an accountant to file their taxes also submit their information for payment. The request included supporting documentation, which would theoretically allow Grok to put together all sorts of data points. The idea is that Grok will learn from these tax returns and become more accurate when a user asks for their own taxes to be completed by the chatbot.<\/p>\n

But employees weren\u2019t just getting cash. They were also going to get access to X Money, a payments platform that\u2019s been in the works for some time. According to Bloomberg, employees who\u2019ve asked about the $420 payments have been told that \u201cthe manager in charge of the program is no longer working there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Grok has had a tumultuous history as arguably the most controversial of the major AI chatbots. And it\u2019s struggling to stay relevant as companies seek to make AI a much more integrated part of every American\u2019s daily life.<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT is previewing a personal finance feature for U.S.-based Pro users that allows people to connect various financial accounts<\/a>. The idea is to allow users to analyze things like their spending patterns and plan for the future. OpenAI assures users that everything about the process is secure, but obviously, when it comes to such sensitive information, people are naturally skeptical.<\/p>\n

In many ways, Musk has always been trying to play catch-up with the other AI companies. Remember when he signed that letter in March 2023, calling for a moratorium on AI development<\/a> for six months, positioning the idea as a way to ensure safety? As we later learned, Musk spent that time starting his own AI company. All he wanted was to slow everyone else down so he could jump ahead. He still hasn\u2019t accomplished that, three years later, but he\u2019s going to keep trying, especially now that he\u2019s brought xAI under the SpaceX umbrella and is about to take the company public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk\u2019s xAI recently offered employees payments of $420 to hand over their completed tax returns for use…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422534,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,3120,10646,105,3123],"class_list":["post-680566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-elon-musk","tag-grok","tag-technology","tag-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680566\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}