Elon Musk’s xAI recently offered employees payments of $420 to hand over their completed tax returns for use in training Grok, according to a new report from Bloomberg. But that same report notes employees haven’t seen a penny of that promised cash. And it’s not clear when it’s coming. Grok has been lagging in the AI chatbot race, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s CoPilot, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini leading in widespread adoption in the U.S. market. Musk has been doing everything he can to get more people to use Grok, pushing it on X users and shoring up government contracts through his ties with the Trump regime. xAI was scrambling to improve Grok before the April 15 tax deadline, according to Bloomberg, and offered employees $420 for their tax return information. That number is a reference to marijuana, of course, and Musk makes that “joke” frequently since he has the same sense of humor as a 15-year-old boy.
Bloomberg reports that xAI expanded the call for volunteers beyond employees and asked that friends and family who’d used an accountant to file their taxes also submit their information for payment. The request included supporting documentation, which would theoretically allow Grok to put together all sorts of data points. The idea is that Grok will learn from these tax returns and become more accurate when a user asks for their own taxes to be completed by the chatbot.
