Elon Musk is looking for top talent.
SpaceX’s AI division is hiring engineers and physicists as the company prepares for what could be its largest IPO in history. In a post to X on Thursday, Musk said he personally reviews all applications that pass “reasonable sanity checks.”
He said applicants don’t need to have any AI experience, but they do need to email the company three bullet points demonstrating “evidence of exceptional competency.”
“Smart people will figure it out right away,” Musk wrote on the X-Post. “If you build something very complex and have it do a useful job, that’s a big plus,” he added.
Musk merged his rocket company with AI startup xAI in February. Previously, xAI operated as an independent business.
It’s a similar approach to Mr. Musk’s past recruiting efforts: getting straight to the point and focusing on results.
When hiring people to help develop Tesla’s AI chips in January, Musk asked candidates to email three bullet points about the “toughest technical problem” they had ever solved.
SpaceX’s latest hiring push is another sign that the competition for high-tech talent is fiercer than ever.
On Tuesday, former Tesla AI director and OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy announced his move to Anthropic, a big win for the AI powerhouse.
As for xAI, which is now part of SpaceX, Musk said in March that he would “review the company’s interview history and re-reach potential candidates” after several co-founders left the company.
SpaceX filed its S-1 paperwork on Wednesday. A formal IPO is scheduled for June. It is expected to raise between $75 billion and $85 billion, which would value the company between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion.