Ex-traders and quants at Elon Musk's XAI are on $300k+ salaries… they're about to be much richer
SpaceXAI, formerly known as XAI, owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, is an interesting place to work. It recently merged with SpaceX, and has forged a shocking alliance with rival AI lab Anthropic. Its researchers and members of technical staff (MTCs) could become very rich when SpaceX has its initial public offering in June; some of them have come from financial services.
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Elon Musk tweeted earlier today that SpaceXAI wants "world-class engineers/physicists" and is considering people with "zero prior experience in AI." Last month, we reported that XAI hired Daniel Pfeifer from Dutch trading firm Optiver and Depei Li from Jane Street spinoff Five Rings. Other recent hires from the quant space are Aarav Patel, a former Citadel Securities quant who joined last October and Rachit Surana, a former Radix Trading quant. Both work on pretraining SpaceXAI's models.
Finance alums are still a relative niche at SpaceXAI however. LinkedIn data suggests that just ~6% of the firm's members of technical staff have previously worked at a major hedge fund or trading firm. Google, Microsoft and Meta appear to be the top funnels into the company currently.
Being an MTC can pay very well. SpaceX's open listings in California post a salary range of $180k to $440k, but data from the H1B salary database suggests that the average pay for XAI MTCs was $311k in 2025. On Levels.fyi, the average total compensation for XAI engineers since the start of 2025 is $601k, suggesting up to half of compensation for the average MTC is in stock. This could be much more (or less) valuable after SpaceX goes public.
It's not all about MTCs. SpaceX has 222 open listings on its website, most of which are either AI tutor roles, or on-site roles in its Memphis and Southaven datacentres. It's also growing a team of 'finance experts' and has hired multiple ex-investment bank trading staff for it. The most senior is Ole Kristian Birkeland, a former BNP Paribas MD and its New York-based head of Latin American credit trading. He left BNP in 2017 and was semi-retired until joining SpaceXAI in December. Other hires include Jawad Khan, a Bank of America trading strategist, and Morgan Stanley high yield credit trader Lucas Bonnike. They joined in February and March, respectively. An open listing for a finance specialist says these specialists work remotely for up to $100 an hour to train and refine XAI's models "with a focus on investment analysis." It's a similar arrangement to OpenAI's 'Project Mercury,' which enlisted investment bankers on up to $150 hour to help it create financial models.
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