Musk’s xAI Turns To Wall Street Bankers To Improve Grok’s Financial Analysis

Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI is expanding efforts to make its chatbot Grok more capable in financial analysis by hiring experienced finance professionals to help train the system, according to Bloomberg.

Job listings show the company is recruiting investment bankers, traders, portfolio managers, and credit analysts to join its data-training teams. These specialists would help teach Grok how to reason through complex financial work, including leveraged loan syndication, distressed investing, mortgage-backed securities, and collateralized loan obligations. The company is also seeking experts with experience in equity and cryptocurrency markets.

The move reflects a broader push by major AI developers to sell products to financial professionals. Competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic have already introduced tools designed to speed up tasks like market analysis, research, and investment memo writing. These advances have raised concerns that some traditional financial software providers could lose relevance.

Compared with those rivals, xAI is generally seen as behind in attracting corporate customers. Much of its revenue so far has come from agreements with Musk-related businesses, including Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX, which merged with xAI last month.

Bloomberg writes that the company is also adjusting its strategy after a turbulent start to the year that included significant staff departures, including members of its founding team, as well as criticism over Grok generating explicit non-consensual images.

Recently, Musk recruited two senior employees from Cursor, an AI coding startup currently seeking funding at a reported valuation of around $50 billion. Musk has acknowledged publicly that xAI still lags competitors in coding tools, a category that has become an important revenue driver for other AI companies.

xAI relies on workers known internally as AI tutors to train Grok by supplying data and adjusting responses. At a recent staff meeting, tutor team lead Diego Pasini said the company’s biggest constraint remains the supply of training data. Much of Grok’s dataset currently comes from X.

Many of the new tutor roles are focused on credit markets, which are under increasing pressure as private credit funds face withdrawals and other industry challenges. Great timing.