Elon Musk’s xAi dives into crypto, tradfi amid $1tn merger with SpaceX

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAi is recruiting for over a dozen crypto and traditional finance roles to train its models, the firm’s website showed on Tuesday.

Among the positions advertised are finance expert roles spanning crypto, equity and fixed-income, private credit, and quantitative trading.

The new crypto role “will contribute directly to xAI’s mission by training and refining our advanced AI models,” the posting said.

Duties include teaching AI models “how crypto quantitative traders analyze blockchain data, model tokenomics, evaluate on-chain flows, manage extreme volatility.”

The job also requires using leading crypto tools, including Nansen, Chainalysis, and DefiLlama, xAI said.

xAI did not immediately respond to a request for commentary on its crypto ambitions when asked by DL News.

Musk and his companies have long been involved in crypto markets, too.

In February 2021, the billionaire dubbed Dogecoin “the people’s crypto,” sending the token soaring by some 800%.

Tesla was one of the first publicly traded US companies to add Bitcoin to its balance sheet in 2021.

Musk‘s consolidation

The slew of new roles comes as Musk’s rocket venture SpaceX is taking over xAI as the billionaire continues consolidating his business interests.

The merger is valued at over $1 trillion, Bloomberg reported on Monday, though the terms of the deal are not public.

xAI began as a unit within the social media company X, formerly Twitter, after Musk bought the firm in 2022. It has since been incorporated and is valued higher than X.

Overall, xAI has drummed up $42 billion from venture investors, placing it behind only OpenAI, one of its competitors in the large language model segment.

Tesla, the electric vehicle company led by Musk, also invested $2 billion into xAI in January.

“In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” xAI said in the press release.

“To harness even a millionth of our Sun’s energy would require over a million times more energy than our civilization currently uses!”

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.