Elon Musk may be joining the game industry, and he’s bringing AI with him of course

Elon Musk has started poking at video games again — this time not with account-boosting, a questionable Elden Ring build, or Cuphead running on a Tesla dashboard, but with actual hiring.

xAI posted a “Video Games Tutor” role that pays $45–$100 an hour to help train Grok on “game concepts, mechanics, and generation.” The listing spells out annotation-heavy work, collaboration with engineers, and even time-zone expectations — right down to “no Wyoming or Illinois” for U.S. hires.

Musk then did what Musk does: amplified it on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). Quoting a post that read “xAI is Hiring for Video Games,” Musk replied: “True.”  

So… is Musk actually getting into games? He’s certainly trying to sound like it. Last year, he riffed that “too many game studios are owned by giant corporations,” adding that xAI would start an “AI game studio to make games great again.”

This looks to be the first tangible step in those plans coming true. Already, outlets are discussing the announcement: how it’s another example of Musk trying to ruin something else for people, and the depressing investment major companies are making in AI game development when there are so many talented industry folk out of work.

But below the bravado, it’s worth considering what this news means.

The “Video Games Tutor” isn’t a game director gig; it’s a data-curation role. It targets indie developers, implying there are no plans to enter the AAA market. The posting emphasizes labeling, critique, and test-and-iterate workflows to sharpen Grok’s ability to understand and generate video game content.

That makes sense if xAI’s goal is an AI “copilot” that can prototype mechanics or write scripts — and there’s circumstantial hype fuel for that: during a recent xAI live demo, Grok 4 was showcased producing a playable first-person shooter in a matter of hours. xAI may focus on supplying useful tools to others in the game industry. It’s nothing out of the ordinary compared with what other AI companies are doing. And AI is here to stay in game development for better or for worse. 

Musk is here to stay, too, and it certainly does seem to be a step toward Elon entering the industry, given his past announcements and history in the industry. What will that look like? 

Is Elon Musk good or bad for gaming?

To give as much credence to a Deus Ex-like villain as possible, the industry could use more leaders who actually like games. Decades of treating games like standard products, live-service bloat, and content cadence roadmaps has left too many publishers led by executives who treat games like perpetual-motion spreadsheets.

Musk, for all the incredibly annoying noise around him, actually likes games. So much of the industry’s leadership is made up of human garbage smelling just as bad as Elon. Having someone who appears to value the fun in games instead of pure profitability is the most positive thing that can be said about it. 

That’s the generous reading. Now the part where it almost certainly falls apart.

First, Musk is already telegraphing a tired and foolish view of games and the people who make them. His announcement came in response to complaints about woke game journalists and companies, and points as a rejection of the exact talent a studio needs to ship anything worthwhile in 2025. So often, great games have been built by multidisciplinary, diverse teams.

What Musk is suggesting leads to Days Gone. 

Also, what talented developer is actually going to want to join this studio? The majority of the industry literally left the platform after Musk’s takeover. Regarding the AI-hook of the company, the latest GDC and industry surveys say the quiet part out loud: more than half of studios are experimenting with AI, but the share of devs who think it’s hurting the industry is growing (around 30% in 2025, up double digits year-over-year), citing IP, ethics, and quality concerns.

The very people xAI wants as champions — veteran designers, writers, art leads — are increasingly predisposed to view “let Grok make the game” with suspicion. 

Finally, making good games is similar, but so different from the tech industry. It’s taste, editing, and culture. Musk’s public operating mode (whiplash product shifts, public firings, ideological jousting) is the opposite of the steady, ego-light environment where teams do their best work. The messy layoffs and DEI team cuts at X are a cautionary case study, not a recruiting poster.

So what impact will Musk actually have on games? If this remains what it is today — a tutor program to make Grok less wrong about design — the near-term impact will be tooling. Some indies that like the LLM over ChatGPT or Claude will spin up prototypes faster. But if Musk tries to stand up a studio, he can expect the hard reality of trying to staff a world-class team in a climate where most of the world-class folks won’t touch the project.

They can expect similar wake-up calls to a multitude of spaces he’s been interested in but doesn’t actually understand. He can expect the worst.