Elon Musk says he's getting back to business at X and Tesla: 'I must be super focused'
Elon Musk had been the face of President Donald Trump 's efforts to reduce the size of government.
More recently, however, the billionaire has said he intends to return his focus to the companies that helped make him the world's richest man.
"Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms," Musk said in a post on his social media platform, X, on Saturday. The site had just grappled with widespread outages.
"I must be super focused on 𝕏/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out."
The comment followed a similar statement Musk made last month during a Tesla earnings call.
"I think I'll continue to spend a day or two per week on government matters for as long as the president would like me to do so, and for as long as it is useful, but starting next month, I'll be allocating far more of my time to Tesla, now that the major work of establishing the Department of Government Efficiency is done," he said at the time.
Musk's foray into government has been marked by major disruptions in the federal workforce, leaving many workers on edge about their futures. Musk and the Trump administration also targeted entire agencies, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the US Agency for International Development.
Musk has been a near-omnipresent part of Trump's White House since January and has become a polarizing figure among the general public as a result.
The tech titan's super PAC, for example, funneled millions of dollars in an unsuccessful effort to help elect the GOP-aligned candidate in a critical Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Many expect his political activism to carry over to the 2026 midterms.
In a virtual appearance at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday, however, Musk said he'd contribute "a lot less" in political donations moving forward, but didn't specify the reasoning behind the decision.
"Well, if I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it," Musk said at the time. "I do not currently see a reason."
Musk's government work led to a backlash against Tesla, throttling share prices. Tesla's stock bounced back immediately after Musk said in the earnings call that he would step back from his work at the White House DOGE Office.
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Elon Musk says xAI will retrain Grok: 'Far too much garbage'
When you're Elon Musk, you don't have to rely on centuries of prevailing human understanding — you can create your own. "We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors," Musk wrote on X on Friday night. Then, he said he would retrain Grok's latest model on that new base of knowledge to be free of proverbial waste. "Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data," he added. Musk has for years endeavored to create products, like the rebranded Twitter and Grok, that are free from what he views as harmful mainstream constraints. Business Insider previously reported that Grok's army of "AI tutors" was training the bot on a host of dicey topics to compete with OpenAI's more "woke" ChatGPT. Musk on Saturday asked X users to respond to his post with examples of "divisive facts" that can be used in Grok's retraining. Gary Marcus, an AI hype critic and professor emeritus at New York University, compared Musk's effort to an Orwellian dystopia, which isn't the first time he's made the comparison. "Straight out of 1984. You couldn't get Grok to align with your own personal beliefs, so you are going to rewrite history to make it conform to your views," he wrote on X in response to Musk. A revamped Grok could have real-world impacts. In May, just as Musk was stepping back from his work in Washington, DC to refocus on his various companies, Reuters reported that DOGE was planning to expand its use of Grok to analyze government data. "They ask questions, get it to prepare reports, give data analysis," a source told Reuters, referring to how the bot was being used. Two other sources told the outlet that officials in the Department of Homeland Security had been encouraged to use it despite the fact that it hadn't been approved. A representative for the department told the New Republic that "DOGE hasn't pushed any employees to use any particular tools or products." Grok has also had security issues. In May, after what the company said was an "unauthorized modification" to its backend, the bot started to frequently refer to "white genocide" in South Africa. The company quickly resolved the issue and said it had conducted a "thorough investigation" and was "implementing measures to enhance Grok's transparency and reliability."
