Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'
The LinkedIn co-founder and investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI offers his most pointed public assessment yet of Elon Musk’s AI ambitions—and raises alarms about the government’s handling of Anthropic’s pulled models
Reid Hoffman has watched the AI industry from virtually every vantage point—as a founder, a lead investor and as a decade-long Microsoft board member. So when he calls SpaceX’s AI strategy “buying your way into relevance” and describes xAI as “a complete train wreck,” it’s not a hot take from the sidelines, but a verdict from one of Silicon Valley’s most respected voices.
“SpaceX isn’t an AI company,” Hoffman said in a conversation with Rana el Kaliouby on her Pioneers of AI podcast. “XAI is, as Elon himself has described, it’s a complete train wreck for its kind of building of foundational models and other kinds of things.” He also noted that all of its founders have left and it’s on its “third restart.”
The xAI co-founder exodus has been well-documented. By May 2026, all 11 of xAI’s original co-founders had departed the company, a cascade that began in earnest in February when Tony Wu , described as one of the most operationally central co-founders, announced his resignation. Musk restructured xAI’s teams in response, but the departures continued. The company’s flagship Grok models have faced persistent criticism for lagging behind competitors from Anthropic and OpenAI in benchmark performance.
The timing of Hoffman’s remarks is pointed. SpaceX went public on June 12th, with AI central to its IPO narrative. Within days, the company announced it was acquiring Cursor, the AI coding tool. Hoffman’s read: that’s not proof of AI capability, but evidence of its absence. “You could almost think of it as the IAC of AI,” he said, invoking the serial acquisitions roll-up strategy of Barry Diller’s internet-era conglomerate. “Use the market cap to buy AI companies and try to buy your way into relevance.”
His assessment of SpaceX’s core compute business was equally withering. The company has positioned revenue from leasing AI infrastructure—including to Anthropic—as validation of its AI credentials. “You’re a premium-priced CoreWeave,” Hoffman said. “I get it. Which is not an AI company.”