Musk bans “researcher” term at xAI after publicly berating employee

Elon Musk publicly berated an xAI employee on X for using the word “researcher” in a job posting, declaring that the company would eliminate the term and only use “engineer” going forward. The incident highlights Musk’s volatile management style and his tendency to humiliate employees publicly, even when they’re simply following existing company practices.

What happened: Aditya Gupta, an xAI employee, posted a routine job advertisement seeking “researchers and engineers” for the AI startup.

• Musk responded with a harsh quote tweet, calling the term “researcher” a “false nomenclature” and “thinly-masked way of describing a two-tier engineering system.”
• He announced that xAI would delete the term “researcher” from its vocabulary, insisting “There are only engineers. Researcher is a relic term from academia.”

The contradiction: Musk’s declaration directly contradicted xAI’s own official materials, which still prominently featured research-related language.

• The xAI careers page describes the team as “AI researchers and engineers on a mission to build AI systems.”
• The specific job posting Gupta shared refers to an “AI engineer and researcher” position within the “engineering & research” division.
• The role explicitly asks for candidates with a “background in AI research.”

Musk’s broader claims: The billionaire used the incident to promote his companies’ supposed superiority over traditional academic institutions.

• “SpaceX does more meaningful, cutting-edge ‘research’ on the advancement of rockets and satellites than all the academic university labs on Earth combined,” Musk claimed.
• He described “researcher” as a “pretentious, low-accountability term” while praising the engineering designation.

Pattern of public humiliation: This incident reflects Musk’s documented history of publicly targeting employees across his companies.

• At Tesla, his electric vehicle company, he was known for “rage firings” and once allegedly threatened to deport an entire engineering team for raising safety concerns.
• After acquiring Twitter (now X), he mocked former employee Haraldur Thorleifsson for his muscular dystrophy, later apologizing and deleting some remarks following backlash.

Employee response: Gupta quickly corrected his post to align with Musk’s demands, likely to preserve his job.

• He posted a simple correction: “looking for solid engineers,” avoiding any further confrontation with his boss.