Former xAI Employee Responds Publicly to Musk's "Overhaul" Comments: Was Once Threatened by Manager for Collecting User Feedback to Improve Grok, "Everyone I knew has left"

According to 1M AI News monitoring, former xAI employee Benjamin De Kraker today posted a long response on X following Musk's tweet that "xAI was not well built from the beginning and is now being rebuilt from the ground up," detailing his experience at xAI. De Kraker stated that when he joined xAI, the company emphasized a "flat structure" and "proactiveness." Leveraging his AI community presence on X, he openly solicited user feedback to improve Grok. The post unexpectedly went viral, and id Software founder John Carmack shared it, resulting in a flood of suggestions. However, the next day, he received a threatening email from management, instructing him to delete all posts, and his X account was suspended.

De Kraker mentioned that xAI was internally "filled with middle managers," where enthusiastic employees came in with ideas but were suppressed by the management. He stated that the manager who threatened him had already left, saying, "Everyone I knew at xAI has left." In February 2025, De Kraker was asked by the company to remove a post ranking AI model programming skills on X (mentioning the unreleased Grok 3). He refused and chose to resign, and the incident was then covered by multiple tech media outlets.