Elon Musk’s xAI has started hiring for a role in London as the company launches its UK operations amid the billionaire’s renewed interest in the country’s politics.
The AI company founded by the tech billionaire will be incorporated in December and will be based at the offices of X (formerly Twitter) in Piccadilly, according to a listing in Companies House.
In the listing, Musk, the world’s richest man with assets of over $400 billion, is listed as a person with significant control, owning more than 75% of the company’s shares and having a majority of voting rights.
Jared Birchall, Musk’s wealth manager, has been named chief financial officer. Birchall is also the CEO and president of Neuralink, a neurotechnology company founded by Musk.
Job openings on xAI’s website include both front-end and back-end software engineers and site reliability engineers.
Toby Pollen, a founding member of xAI and a former AI researcher at Google DeepMind who is believed to lead the London team, suggested more positions would be available this month.
The move makes xAI the latest major US AI company to open an office in the UK, following ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which opened its first office outside the US in St James’s Park in 2023. Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, also opened an office near St. Paul’s Cathedral in the same year.
xAI has been present in London since March last year, when Pollen hired its first batch of backend and data software developers.
The company’s website states that the team is “comprised of experienced engineers working on large-scale distributed systems across data, research, and products.”
The listing also shows that the company hired Lewis Silkin to advise on its incorporation. According to a report from law.com, the top 50 law firm represented Company X several times before Musk’s acquisition.
Founded in 2023, xAI developed Grok, an X-accessible chatbot, and Aurora, an image generation software.
The company raised $6 billion in a Series C funding round in December, and its valuation is believed to be around $40 billion.
Alongside xAI’s expansion in the UK, listings show that Musk’s XPAY was trademarked in the UK last month, with UK fintech expertise behind the decision to launch operations in the UK. It has been shown that it is possible. The peer-to-peer payment service was scheduled to launch in the U.S. in 2024, but it hasn’t launched yet.
More than 60,000 people work in the AI sector in the UK, bringing in more than £10bn in income, according to the latest government data. Meanwhile, a Thomson Reuters study revealed that more than a quarter of technology jobs in the UK were AI-related last year, leading to an explosion in hiring for AI-related roles. It’s increasing.
LinkedIn data backs this up, showing that jobs in AI engineering and research have been among the fastest growing in the UK over the past three years. Additionally, UKTN research found that around 3,300 “AI” entities have been registered with Companies House since the beginning of 2023, with more than half of them based in London.
xAI’s expansion into London comes as Musk has increased his interest in British politics. The tech billionaire has announced his support for the new right-wing party Reform UK, which won five seats and 14.3% of the overall vote in the 2024 UK general election.
In December, party leader Nigel Farage said negotiations were underway for Musk to fund the reforms when the two met at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida. admitted. The Times reported that the donation may have reached $100 million.
But Mr Musk has since poured cold water on the possibility of a donation to Mr Farage, recently calling for Mr Farage to be replaced, saying he “doesn’t have the necessary qualifications” to lead the party in the post on X. .
Mr Musk has also been at loggerheads with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in recent weeks over accusations that he covered up the Rochdale grooming scandal. Mr Starmer denies the charges.
The Tesla boss also called Protection Minister Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” and said the MP should be jailed over the scandal over her posts on X. Phillips told BBC Newsnight that the “misinformation” Musk had spread “was putting her at risk and that she feared for her own safety.
