Elon Musk boosts Tesla engineer salaries amidst poaching threat from OpenAI and competitors

CEO of Tesla Motors, Elon Musk admits Tesla Inc. is facing challenges retaining artificial intelligence specialists, some of whom have left the carmaker in the past year to join his AI venture.

Tesla is offering increased compensation to its AI engineering team based on performance milestones, Musk stated on his social media platform, X. Musk responded to reports of four engineers leaving Tesla for his startup xAI, attributing the situation to "the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen."

Ethan is very talented, but “vision chief” would be overstating things.

There are over 200 excellent engineers in the Tesla AI/Autonomy team. Tesla’s pace of progress with autonomy is accelerating.

The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2024

“Tesla is increasing comp (contingent on progress milestones) of our AI engineering team,” said Musk. “They (OpenAI) have aggressively recruited Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases,” he added, while posting.

“There are over 200 excellent engineers in the Tesla AI/Autonomy team Tesla’s pace of progress with autonomy is accelerating. The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen,” he said.

The departure of staff from Musk's flagship company to his latest venture could heighten worries regarding conflicts and governance within his business empire.