‘It will inherit your thoughts’: Musk tells SpaceX employees they’ll be Grok’s ‘parents’ as AI trains on company data

Elon Musk is asking SpaceX employees to think of themselves as more than rocket-builders—he wants them to be “parents” of the company’s AI.

During a recent SpaceX all-hands meeting, the world’s richest-man said the company plans to train its GrokAI on the “sum total” of SpaceX’s information, including the work and contributions of its employees.

The meeting— shared by SpaceX on X—was posted on Tuesday morning.

Musk told workers they would “effectively be the parents of the AI,” because Grok would inherit their “thoughts and ideas and beliefs.” Musk presented the arrangement, arguing that SpaceX’s workforce includes some of the world’s strongest engineers and that their collective knowledge could help shape a more capable AI system.

The precise categories of employee information that will be used have not been publicly detailed.

Reports describing Musk’s comments say the plan involves SpaceX’s internal data and employee contributions, but SpaceX has not publicly provided a comprehensive explanation of what information will be included or how employees’ data will be handled.

The SpaceX CEO described the workers as contributors to the GrokAI’s identity.

He explained the resulting model from the training will inherit something from the employees that produced it.

“So in a way, it will be trained on you,” Musk said.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This isn’t the first time big tech tried tracking employees to train AI models.

In April, Meta rolled out a program known as the Model Capability Initiative that captured employee mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes and screenshots to generate data for training its AI models.

The goal was to teach AI agents how people navigate computers and perform workplace tasks.

According to Meta, the information was not to be used for employee performance reviews and safeguards were in place.