Elon Musk appoints Indian-origin engineers at xAI amid SpaceX IPO plans

Three Indian-origin engineers have been promoted to leadership roles at Elon Musk's xAI as the company restructures its engineering team ahead of SpaceX's planned IPO.

xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk, has promoted three Indian-origin engineers, Devendra Chaplot, Aman Madaan and Aditya Gupta, to leadership positions as part of a broader reorganisation of its engineering team.

The changes come as xAI aligns more closely with SpaceX ahead of a planned initial public offering of the rocket company.

According to a Business Insider report citing an internal memo, SpaceX executive Michael Nicholls, who is also a senior vice president at Starlink, will now serve as president of xAI. In the memo, he said the company was "clearly behind" its peers and needed to act quickly to improve performance.

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Under the new structure, Chaplot, who joined xAI last month, will lead pre-training. This involves training AI models on large datasets including text, images and code. Chaplot is a former researcher at Facebook and Thinking Machines Labs. Madaan will head the model factory and tooling team, overseeing infrastructure, data pipelines and training workflows. Gupta will lead post-training and reinforcement learning, focusing on refining models and aligning them for practical use.

Additional changes have been made across teams. Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg, who joined xAI in March, will lead the product team working on Grok Main, Grok Voice and Grok Imagine. Jake Palmer will head physical infrastructure, while Daniel Dueri will oversee compute infrastructure. Matt Monson from SpaceX's Starlink division will also take on responsibility for data at xAI.

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The memo noted that training performance was currently low and said improvements are planned over the next two months. It also stated that the role changes are effective immediately and aimed at better defining responsibilities.

The restructuring follows a period of internal changes at xAI, including the exit of several cofounders and senior leaders. Engineers from Tesla and SpaceX have also been working with the company at its Palo Alto office as part of the transition.