Elon is brilliant when it comes to hardware. But unfortunately with xAI, he went on a firing spree, PayPal Mafia style, just like with Twitter when he bought it, shortly before doing another hiring drive, and failing to hire software engineers at scale.

The datacenter deals came after. But now, the man who promised the world an AI system that defends free speech and is “pro-human”, is instead selling to his competitors and lowering the daily app usage limits of his own Grok by an order of magnitude (really).

If you’re dealing with the world’s richest man, you can predict that money will come before other concerns despite other rhetoric. Interesting strategy though!

Edit: To be fair, they did decide that hardware was "the bottleneck" according to an interview I saw last year. But I firmly believe they underestimated the software problem (and their app was/is riddled with them).