Faulty reasoning signals

• Hasty Generalization - 12.8%
• Pessimism Bias - 8.1%
• Availability Heuristic - 7.8%

Article text

Inside xAI: 100-hour weeks, boardrooms named ‘Judgment Day,’ and a culture of fear

A former employee of Elon Musk’s AI company opens up about the grueling work environment — and why he still misses it.

Published Jul. 9, 2026 at 6:00am

Email (opens in new tab)

Twitter (opens in new tab)

Bluesky (opens in new tab)

Facebook (opens in new tab)

LinkedIn (opens in new tab)

Telegram (opens in new tab)

WhatsApp (opens in new tab)

Reddit (opens in new tab)

By the time he got sick enough to go to the emergency room, he had been working 100-hour weeks for several months. But a 26-year-old xAI employee, who spoke with The Standard on condition of anonymity, knew the work didn’t stop. Texts he received from his boss while he was in the ER waiting room confirmed it. That was when he knew the culture at Elon Musk’s AI company had crossed from intense to something else entirely.

The employee spent five months over the last year at Elon Musk’s AI company overseeing data spending and vendor relationships before being laid off. He described a workplace built as much on fear as ambition: 80- and 100-hour weeks, beds in the office, boardrooms called “Skynet” and “Judgment Day,” and a running joke that anyone who lasted 18 months was a Christmas miracle. He spoke on condition of anonymity; The Standard has independently confirmed his employment through LinkedIn.

On June 12, SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history. A few months before it went public at a valuation of $1.77 trillion, the company acquired xAI in a nifty bit of financial engineering. Musk, who holds a voting stake of up to 85%, remains the center of the company. Many of his workers are now multimillionaires; others were chewed up and spit out before the company went public, like this employee. He now works at another AI startup but spoke about his experience at xAI.

xAI did not respond to a request for comment.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

When did it dawn on you what you’d signed up for?

It happened in the first two days. I saw a colleague wearing the same clothes for several days in a row. At first, I thought it was a joke. I asked what he was doing, and he told me he hadn’t left the office. I remember thinking, am I not working hard enough? The first month, I was living in the office. There are beds downstairs. I’ve done 80-hour weeks, 100-hour weeks before, and this was more than that. I got so sick I had to go to the hospital, and I brought my phone in and kept texting my boss, still working, while sick. They told me I had to complete my work. That’s when I knew this was beyond a motivating culture. It was too much.

How does xAI compare to companies in other industries you’ve worked at, such as private equity and venture capital?

I will say confidently that the work culture at xAI is the most aggressive I have ever seen in my entire life. Period. I’ve worked with really smart, very educated people before, but it never felt like everything needed to happen yesterday. The pacing there was like nothing I’d seen.

xAI moves in dog years. People celebrate six months there, three months there. Someone who has worked there a year, that’s like working 20 years anywhere else. If you’ve been there a year and a half, you’re a Christmas miracle.

You’ve mentioned that your faith shapes how you think about this.

More about AI Is Eating SF

AI isn’t coming for your job, unless you’re a Bay Area tech worker

My mom wants a sex robot. Will China or the U.S. give it to her first?

San Francisco invents the future — but lets other cities build it

I was at a church in the city once, and a priest said something that stuck with me. In Catholicism, we’re created in the image of God. So what do we do? We make something in our own image: humanoid robots, bipedal, with a layer of consciousness laid over them. That’s where my Christian brain turns on.

There are people in the Bay Area, plenty of them, who think we should take our consciousness out of ourselves and put it into a machine. I asked why they wanted this. What they said wasn’t really about technology. It was about the constraints of being human: a body that fails, a mind that forgets, a life that just ends. There are actually a lot of Christians sprinkled around xAI, and I don’t think it has much to do with politics. Some of them aren’t even conservative.

What drove people to stay?

Part of it was fear, and part of it was the mission. Every single day I worked that job, everyone walked in expecting it to be their last day — everyone, unless you were Elon or basically his next of kin. They set impossible expectations, and they knew it. The idea is that if you break through, great, but what if you had 10% more in the tank? So they make you fail repeatedly, make you feel like you’re constantly about to be fired, so your output stays at 110%, always.

Have thoughts on this story?

The motivation at my current job is about wanting to win. At xAI, the motivation was built around fear. I had a ton of nights where I just wasn’t sleeping. I’d lie in bed thinking about work, because I was afraid of losing my job. And yet I still loved that job. I loved it even when I hated it. When I met up with old colleagues recently, I told them I missed working with them, and they looked at me like I was crazy. They reminded me that every day there, we were afraid for our jobs.

They have boardrooms called “Skynet” and “Judgment Day.” It’s like if a movie came out before the Manhattan Project naming the cities they were going to bomb, and someone made a boardroom in the lab and called it Hiroshima. But I get it. If you make a joke out of it, people get less scared. Everyone at xAI has a very good sense of humor. Laughter keeps everyone going.

It felt like being on the team building the nuclear bomb at the end of World War II. Everyone knows you’re building something that will dramatically change the world. You don’t know how. It could kill us all, or it could cure cancer. You just don’t know.

When you’re integrated enough to watch how things are being made, you know it’s history, and you get to interact with history being made. There are guys from the military at the company, and they joke about it themselves — that camaraderie you build even when you hate the work. There’s something like patriotism to it. You’re fighting for something bigger than yourself.

But presumably there were perks.

Elon had a pizza oven flown in from Italy. They flew in people from Japan to make sushi. The food was really good, and it was free, so I can’t be upset about that. But I noticed they did tricky things to incentivize people to stay longer. It was almost gamified. They wouldn’t force you to stay, but dinner would creep later and later in the day, so people would inevitably stick around for it.

There’s also a gym downstairs that I don’t think anyone uses. I tried it once and felt this obscure pressure, like, you have time to work out but not to work? I never went back. I miss it, honestly. Taking a walk, being outside in the sun, you don’t realize how special that is until it’s gone.

Free laundry, free haircuts, dentists coming into the office. They just don’t want you to leave.

What worries you most about where this technology is headed?

Whatever guardrail you put in place, it’s not going to hold. There’s going to be a point where it breaks through. There have been labs that put models in silos, threatened to turn them off, and the model went digging up blackmail material on an employee (opens in new tab) . Now amplify that to the most intelligent models with the biggest hardware behind them. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Once researchers themselves can be automated, once a machine can replicate how you think and do it better than you, that’s the runaway train. That’s where things really take off. Once it gets smarter than all of humanity combined, that’s where you start bending the limits of physics. How we develop materials, how we transport electricity, things that sound like science fiction just become reality.

What does that mean for jobs?

There are people in that building looking at code, ostensibly developing software, but they’re really not. The overwhelming majority, something like 99.9% of that building, aren’t actively writing software anymore. They’re funneling ideas through models and letting AI build it for them. So what really is your role as a software engineer at that point?

People say, go into blue-collar work — AI can’t replace that. But robots are being trained right now to change light bulbs, do basic electrical work, and do plumbing. If they’re more efficient, cheaper, and never need to sleep, what would you do? On paper, it makes no sense to keep using a human. I think the safest fields right now are law and last-mile medical treatment — someone actually looking at a patient and performing something that needs human sign-off. Even that might not hold. You could walk into a hospital one day and never interact with a human at all. In the next 20 years, I think we’re looking at another industrial revolution, times 100, and honestly, that feels like the conservative estimate.

Given everything you just described, why are you still optimistic about any of this?

My relative recently got cancer. She’s doing OK. But you start seeing people you love get sick, and that’s a big part of why I’m optimistic about this technology. I genuinely wanted to help people. That’s why I was there. Healthcare is hard to get in this country. It’s expensive. AI is free and more accessible, and it reaches a wider range of people. A lot of the information doctors have is siloed, not nearly as accessible as you’d think. These labs hire some of the best doctors in the world, and the more access the models have to that expertise, the more visible the gaps in medical knowledge become. The goal is for AI to become recursive in its own research.

If you have a technology that anyone can access at any time, though, you’ll always have people who want to use it to cause harm. It’s a big responsibility, and because everything is moving so quickly, those are questions that are genuinely hard to answer.

Would you ever go back?

xAI was a great place to be while I was there, but the tide was changing too. When I left, SpaceX came in, management changed, and it’s not really run by xAI anymore. It’s run by SpaceX. They actually wanted me to come back, to work in another part of the company. It just didn’t work out.

AI AI Is Eating SF Elon Musk News SpaceX