Elon Musk’s xAI has begun hiring for roles in London as the firm sets up shop in the UK amid the billionaire’s new-found interest in the country’s politics.
A listing on Companies House says the AI firm founded by the tech billionaire was incorporated in December and will be based in X’s (formerly Twitter’s) office in Piccadilly.
The listing cites Musk, the world’s richest man with a wealth of over $400bn, as a person with significant control, owning 75% or more of the firm’s shares and having majority voting rights.
Jared Birchall, Musk’s wealth manager, is cited as the Chief Financial Officer. Birchall is also the Chief Executive and President of Neuralink, a neurotechnology firm founded by Musk.
Job openings on xAI’s website include software engineers on both the front and backend as well as a site reliability engineer.
Toby Pohlen, a founding member of xAI and former AI researcher at Google’s DeepMind who is thought to be leading the London team, indicated that more positions would open this month.
The move makes xAI the latest major US AI firm to open an office in the UK following in the footsteps of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which in 2023 opened an office in St James’ Park, its first outside the US. Anthropic, creator of the Claude chatbot, also opened an office close to St Paul’s Cathedral in the same year.
xAI has been present in London since March last year when Pohlen recruited an initial wave of software developers in backend and data.
The firm’s website says that the team “consists of highly experienced engineers who work on large-scale distributed systems across data, research, and product.”
The listing also shows that the firm hired Lewis Silkin to advise on its incorporation. The top 50 law firm previously represented X on several occasions before Musk’s acquisition, according to a report from law.com.
Founded in 2023, xAI has developed Grok, a chatbot that can be accessed through X, as well as Aurora, an image generation software.
The firm is thought to be valued at around $40bn following a series C funding round in December in which it raised $6bn.
Alongside the expansion of xAI in the UK, listings show that Musk’s XPAY was trademarked in the UK last month in signs Britain’s fintech expertise could be behind the decision to launch operations here. The peer-to-peer payments service was expected to launch in the US in 2024 but is yet to do so.
The most recent government data show that more than 60,000 people in Britain work in the AI sector, bringing in more than £10bn in revenues. Meanwhile, recruitment for AI-related roles has exploded as research by Thomson Reuters revealed last year that AI roles made up more than a quarter of tech jobs advertised in the UK.
Data from LinkedIn also supports this, showing that jobs in AI engineering and research were among the fastest growing in the UK during the last three years. In addition, research by UKTN found that around 3,300 ‘AI’ entities have been registered with Companies House since the beginning of 2023, with over half based in London.
xAI’s expansion into London comes as Musk has shown increased interest in UK politics. The tech billionaire has indicated his support for Reform UK, a new right-wing party that won five seats at the UK’s general election in 2024 and won 14.3% of the vote overall.
In December, Nigel Farage, the party’s leader confirmed that talks were in progress for Musk to bankroll Reform when the two met at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s residence in Florida. The Times reported that the donation could have been as large as $100m.
But Musk has since poured cold water on the prospect of donating to Farage, recently calling for his replacement saying he “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead the party in a post on X.
Musk has also sparred with prime minister Sir Keir Starmer recent weeks over accusations that the he covered up the Rochdale grooming scandal. Starmer denies the allegation.
The Tesla boss has also called Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, a “rape genocide apologist” and said the MP should be jailed over the scandal in a post on X. Phillips told the BBC’s Newsnight that the “disinformation” spread by Musk was “endangering” her and that she feared for her own safety.
