Sulaiman Ghori, a former engineer at xAI, shared a series of revealing insights about the company and Elon Musk during a recent episode of the "Relentless" podcast. Four days after the interview aired, Ghori was no longer employed at xAI, though neither the company nor Musk has commented on the timing or circumstances of his departure. Ghori has not publicly addressed his exit. Here are 10 of the most striking quotes from his interview: xAI’s data centers are built on temporary “carnival” leases. Ghori explained that these short-term agreements—originally intended for events like carnivals—allowed the company to bypass lengthy permitting processes and start construction quickly. “It was the fastest way to get the permitting through and actually start building things,” he said. When host Ti Morse joked, “So xAI is actually just a carnival company?” Ghori replied, “It’s a carnival company.” xAI teams are increasingly run by AI agents. Ghori described a core production team consisting of just one human and 20 AI agents. “They’re very good, and they’re capable of doing it,” he said. He also noted the confusion caused by AI employees, recounting instances where he received pings asking if an AI on the org chart was absent. Each code commit to xAI’s repository is worth about $2.5 million. Ghori said the company has calculated the value of individual contributions. “I did five today,” he said. “My work for the day would be valued at $12.5 million.” Elon Musk steps in when hardware fails. When new equipment from Nvidia or other suppliers doesn’t work right away, Musk often joins the team directly. “We would work side-by-side until that was resolved,” Ghori said. “Otherwise it would have taken weeks of back-and-forth.” Musk offered a Cybertruck as a bet. During GPU rack setup, Musk challenged engineers: “You can get a Cybertruck tonight if you can get a training run on these GPUs in 24 hours.” Ghori said the engineer who won the bet now has a Cybertruck parked outside his lunch window. No one assigned Ghori tasks during onboarding. On his first day, he received a laptop and badge but no desk or clear direction. “My first day, they just gave me a laptop and a badge,” he said. He eventually reached out to cofounder Greg Yang to find his role, which led him to work on the Ask Grok feature. xAI uses sleeping pods, bunk beds, and tents. The company embraces a culture of long hours. Ghori confirmed the presence of sleeping pods, bunk beds, and even tents on-site. “When the tent picture came out, everyone kept sending it to me,” he said. “We have tents, but I’ve never seen that many out at once.” He added that whoever is awake responds when Musk spots a late-night issue. xAI is building “human emulators.” Ghori worked on the Macrohard team, which is developing digital replicas of human behavior. These emulators will mimic how humans interact with screens, keyboards, and mice—similar to how Tesla’s Optimus robot replicates physical actions. Dormant Teslas could power the emulators. With 4 million Teslas in North America and most sitting idle 70–80% of the time, Ghori proposed using them as a distributed computing fleet. “That’s something without any build-out requirement,” he said. Musk has previously suggested the same idea, calling idle Teslas a “massive distributed AI inference fleet.” xAI’s models are planned years ahead. Ghori joined in March 2025, but Grok-5 was already fully designed and planned before he arrived. “The model was ‘planned out and designed’ far in advance,” he said, highlighting the company’s long-term vision.