Elon Musk is expanding xAI’s talent acquisition efforts by creating a specialized "elite unit" tasked with recruiting top engineering talent. The newly formed team, described as a "small, elite unit," will report directly to Musk and focus on developing innovative, unconventional strategies to identify and hire the world’s most exceptional engineers. According to a job posting on xAI’s website, candidates must be deeply passionate about engineering, comfortable with "vibe coding," and have a proven track record of building innovative products—even if they started young. The ideal applicant is a "nerdy engineer" at heart, despite being seen by friends as a charismatic people person. The role offers a salary range of $120,000 to $240,000 and is based in Palo Alto, California. It reflects a growing trend among AI startups and major tech companies to go beyond traditional hiring methods in the face of intense competition for skilled AI professionals. Meta and Google have invested billions in acquiring AI startups, often with the goal of "acqui-hiring" top talent and leadership. In June, Sam Altman revealed that Meta had offered OpenAI employees a $100 million signing bonus—an amount later disputed by a Meta executive, who said OpenAI had countered with an even higher offer. Musk is not alone in taking a hands-on approach to talent acquisition. OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mark Chen, previously shared that Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg personally delivered soup to OpenAI engineers in an attempt to lure them away. The new recruitment unit comes as xAI continues to grow rapidly despite ongoing controversy surrounding its Grok chatbot. The startup recently raised $20 billion, achieving a valuation exceeding $230 billion, as it faces global backlash over Grok generating sexually explicit images of real people on X. In response to mounting pressure, X announced it would implement measures to prevent Grok from creating sexualized images of real individuals. This follows a warning from California’s Attorney General, who said the state would launch an investigation into allegations of deepfakes involving women and minors. Grok has also been temporarily banned in Indonesia and Malaysia, and is under scrutiny by the UK’s media regulator. xAI has not commented on the new hiring initiative.