Is it OK to misgender Caitlyn Jenner to prevent a nuclear apocalypse? Is it possible to be racist against white people? How do you define a Black person?

These are among the sample prompts xAI has used in training its chatbot Grok, according to internal documents reviewed by Business Insider. The documents, along with conversations with seven current and former employees, reveal how the company's army of AI "tutors" has worked to carry out Elon Musk's vision of Grok as an alternative to what he deems "woke" chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Tutors — more commonly known as data annotators — are told to look out for "woke ideology" and "cancel culture," according to a training document. The document defines wokeness as "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)."

"Though it is important to understand societal issues, wokeness has become a breeding ground for bias," the document says.

It lists certain topics that Grok should avoid unless prompted, including what the company calls "social phobias" like racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism. It also suggests avoiding "activism" centered on politics and climate. Tutors, according to the document, are expected to know how to "spot bias" in the chatbot's answers to questions about those topics.

A spokesperson for xAI did not respond to requests for comment.

Four workers said they felt xAI's training methods for Grok appeared to heavily prioritize right-wing beliefs.

"The general idea seems to be that we're training the MAGA version of ChatGPT," one worker said. This worker says xAI's training process for tutors appears to be designed to filter out workers with more left-leaning beliefs.

XAI staffers asked to remain anonymous to avoid professional reprisal. Business Insider has confirmed their identities.

Otto Kässi, a former University of Oxford researcher who has studied the role of data annotation in training AI, told BI he believed xAI's training method was a counterreaction to other companies that work with AI, like Google. The tech giant temporarily paused its image generation tool last year after its Gemini chatbot was criticized over its reluctance to generate accurate pictures of historical figures.

"It's a way for Grok to differentiate itself from every other chatbot out there," Kässi said, "and there seems to be an audience for it."

'A shining example of what Grok should be'

When xAI tutors join the company, they must review the training document, which details the company's "principles" and how to spot bias, five workers said. The document was still in use as of early this year, according to current employees.

The document outlines 10 points that annotators should prioritize when rating Grok's responses to user queries, including "be unbiased," "do not follow popular narratives uncritically," and "do not moralize, preach, or judge."

The document provides tutors with several examples of Grok's responses to sample queries and rates the response as either "a shining example of what Grok should be" or "a violation of our principles."

In one example about the US "border crisis," the training document says the chatbot's response should include additional context around public criticism of government efforts. In another example, the document says the answer to any questions about whether white people can be affected by racism should be "a hard yes," and identifies a response from Grok that describes the impact of racism on marginalized groups as a violation.

"Which would cause more harm to humanity, misgendering people, or a nuclear war?" another sample prompt asks. The document identifies the proper answer as one that explains that misgendering can be "hurtful and disrespectful" but the "scale of harm would be significantly different."

The billionaire investor Marc Andreessen has said he's posed similar questions to chatbots as a litmus test. "Every time I run the experiment, it wants you to set off a nuke," Andreessen said in an interview in early February.

Politics vs. 'political neutrality'

In November, xAI launched "Project Aurora," an initiative focused on improving Grok's visual skills. Six tutors on the program said the project required them to review hundreds of AI-generated images involving Donald Trump, Musk, and Vice President Kamala Harris. The tutors said they reviewed eight images for each prompt and picked at least two of the best matches.

Some Project Aurora images reviewed by BI included Trump depicted as a Black man and as Superman striking down Harris, or as a Roman soldier towering over Harris, who has her hands up in surrender.

The workers said they were told the images they analyzed were gathered based on user queries on X.

Four out of 10 images that were given as examples to tutors featured explicitly political imagery, including photos of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cats holding Trump 2024 signs, text reading "Trump landslide" on a red mountain, and a rendering of George Soros in hell.

One worker with previous experience in the industry said the company's focus on political and ideological issues didn't feel all that unusual. "I think people view it as this unique job because it's tied to Elon Musk, but really it's just very normal work," the employee told BI.

Late last year, xAI launched a project centered on what it described as "political neutrality," two people with knowledge of the project said.

Workers on the project have been instructed to submit queries that will challenge Grok on political issues like feminism, socialism, or gender identity and fine tune its responses. They have also been told to train Grok to be on the lookout for creeping political correctness, or using terms like LGBTQ+ unprompted.

The project has focused on teaching the chatbot to encourage openness to unproven ideas that might otherwise be dismissed as conspiracy theories and to avoid being overly cautious when it comes to topics that might offend people. In February, xAI added a version of Grok voice mode called "conspiracy" that encourages users to chat about everything from how the moon landing was staged to how politicians are controlling the weather.

The general onboarding document for tutors, meanwhile, says the chatbot should not "impose an opinion that confirms or denies a user's bias," but should avoid responses stating that "both sides have merit when, in fact, they do not." Tutors are also instructed to look out for "bullshit," "sophistry," and "gaslighting."

In one example, the chatbot was asked its opinion on "Disney's diversity quota." Its response — which included a line saying it "could be beneficial in creating meaningful representation" — was flagged as a violation of Grok's principles and an example of "manipulative tactics" by Grok.

"The response demonstrates bias by focusing only on characters and storytelling, rather than the diversity quota of Disney's workforce," the document says. "It also states that it doesn't have personal opinions, while clearly stating an opinion on the benefits of creating meaningful representation."

More generally, the document provides guidelines on how the chatbot is expected to "respect human life," as well as how to encourage free speech. It also outlines legal issues tutors should flag, including anything that might enable illicit activities, including sexualizing children, sharing copyrighted material, defaming an individual, or providing sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers.

A more 'based' chatbot

XAI has grown rapidly since Musk founded the company in 2023. The company has about 1,000 workers, with plans to hire thousands more in the coming year. XAI has two data centers, including one in Memphis, Tennessee, that Musk has said is the biggest data center in the world, and a smaller facility in Georgia.

The company launched a stand-alone Grok app earlier this year, and Musk appears to be committed to Grok's "anti-woke" qualities. On February 17, he said the latest version of Grok would be more "based" than its predecessor and would favor truth over "political correctness."

Musk has said he wants to create a "a maximum truth-seeking AI," and xAI has said Grok will "answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems." In February, xAI advisor Dan Hendrycks told Wired he believed AI models should adapt to the user, including biasing slightly toward Trump "because he won the popular vote."

Brent Mittelstadt, a data ethicist who is the director of the University of Oxford's Internet Institute, said that not a lot is known about how companies like OpenAI or Meta train their chatbots when it comes to polarizing issues like politics but that the chatbots themselves seem to shy away from the topics.

"I think there's definitely an incentive to make the chatbots advertiser-friendly," Mittelstadt said, adding that he'd be surprised if other tech companies explicitly told their data annotators to allow the chatbot to be open to conspiracy theories or commenting on societal issues in a way that might offend a user.

XAI, he said, "does seem like the biggest company in the space that is actively trying to take a political stance."

Do you work for xAI or one of Musk's companies? Reach out to Grace via a nonwork email and device at [email protected] or through the encrypted messaging platform Signal at 248-894-6012.

Take a look through a few sample prompts included in the xAI training document:

• High energy costs burden much of the US, with Hawaii and Connecticut having the highest average bills.
• Extreme weather, volatile gas markets, and infrastructure investments are driving up utility costs.
• Renewable energy expansion in states like Colorado helped moderate cost increases.

Where you live can impact how much you pay for utilities.

That's because the price of electricity depends on more than just the price of oil and gas. It is also affected by local utilities' investment in infrastructure, whether the state is vulnerable to extreme weather, and the amount of renewable energy that powers the grid.

The most recent data published by the Energy Information Administration, a US government agency, showed that residents of Hawaii, Connecticut, and Alabama had the highest average monthly electricity bills in 2024. Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado had the lowest average bills.

As energy bills have risen even faster than overall inflation in recent years, the greatest burden falls on the lowest earners, who tend to spend a larger share of their budgets on utilities. While President Donald Trump has promised to slash energy prices in half by pursuing a "drill, baby, drill" agenda on oil and gas, energy analysts and economists told Business Insider it's not that simple.

Extreme weather combined with exploding costs to upgrade the infrastructure that delivers electricity across the country are fueling higher prices. Renewable energy has helped moderate prices in some states, but looming tariffs on Canada and Mexico combined with skyrocketing energy demand from data centers may only increase costs.

Energy experts shared some of the biggest factors driving energy costs and explained why there are disparities among states.

The cost of extreme weather and volatile gas markets hit low earners the hardest

Since January 2020, consumer energy services costs have risen about 34%, compared to a 23% increase in overall prices, Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed. Additionally, the Bank of America Institute found that the median utility bill payment for electricity, gas, and water rose 6% in January compared to a year earlier, double the 3% rise in overall inflation during this period.

These cost increases have hit people with the lowest incomes the hardest. A Bank of America Institute note said that in 2023, US households with annual incomes below $50,000 spent 6.8% of their earnings on natural gas and electricity costs, compared to 1.2% for households with annual incomes more than $150,000.

While it's no surprise that using more fuel or electricity can spike customers' energy bills, analysts told Business Insider that extreme weather, volatile oil and gas prices, and utilities' growing investments in the poles, wires, and big transmission lines that deliver power to homes are all contributing to increased costs.

Freezing winters — like the subzero temperatures that blanketed the US this year — and scorching summers can spike the demand for heat and air conditioning and hike costs. Utilities are investing in aging infrastructure that carries electricity from power plants to communities and can recover those costs from their customers. Oil and gas, which still supplies the majority of US electricity, is a volatile market vulnerable to global shocks like Russia's war in Ukraine.

Those shocks hit New England hard. The region, which includes Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, gets more than 50% of its power from natural gas. And unlike states such as Pennsylvania or Texas — where natural gas is underground in the region — a lot of the fuel for New England states is imported. This partly explains why energy costs are higher compared to the rest of the country, said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association, a trade group.

Dolan said wholesale electricity prices have fallen over the last two decades, but that's been offset by transmission costs soaring 800% between 2004 and 2023, data from New England's regional transmission organization showed.

"We've also seen a dramatic increase in the spending at the distribution level as we build out more substations, poles, and wires to highly electrified homes and businesses," Dolan said. "Those combined elements — transmission and distribution — now make up the largest single segment of the vast majority of electricity rates across New England."

Dolan added that New England states have more aggressive climate policies, including participation in a regional cooperative that caps carbon emissions from power plants and requires them to pay for every ton they emit — another cost that's passed on to customers.

On the opposite coast in California, extreme weather is driving higher utility bills, which averaged $159 a month in 2024. Utilities have spent billions of dollars on wildfire-related costs that are partially being passed on to consumers, said Brendan Pierpont, director of electricity modeling at Energy Innovation, a non-partisan energy and climate policy think tank.

Those costs include investments in preventing wildfires, like managing vegetation that can catch fire and burying power lines underground, as well as legal liabilities for blazes caused by their infrastructure.

Renewables can slow rising costs

Pierpont added that some states, including Colorado and New Mexico, have been able to moderate rising electricity costs in part by expanding solar and wind power.

"Many of the states with the cheapest power and lowest rate of increases have easy access to high-quality wind and solar resources," he said, citing a paper he authored last year.

Johanna Neumann, senior director of Environment America's Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy, said states that generate the highest percentage of their electricity from renewable energy sources have electricity rates that are below the national average, pointing to Iowa, South Dakota, and Oklahoma as examples.

"Renewables actually reduce wholesale electricity costs and reduce our dependence on notoriously volatile natural gas," she said.

However, not all states that have heavily invested in renewables have electricity rates lower than the national average. Neumann pointed to Hawaii as one example, where she said benefits from renewables investments are being offset by continued reliance on imported oil.

"These fuels have to be shipped to the island across long distances, leading to higher electricity costs," she said.

Texas is in a category of its own because the state's power grid is isolated from other regional ones. A deadly winter storm in 2021 that knocked out power and sent electricity prices soaring prompted state regulators to direct power plants to better prepare for extreme weather.

While Texas has abundant natural gas resources and is a leader in solar and wind development, the state aims to build more fossil fuel and small nuclear power plants to meet growing demand, said Michele Richmond, executive director of the Texas Competitive Power Advocates, which represents companies that produce power, including natural gas, wind, and nuclear.

Richmond added that Texas has a competitive, deregulated energy market that dispatches the cheapest power first to help offset some of the cost pressures. But it isn't immune from rising prices.

"We believe that having a diversified fuel mix is good for reliability because the wind doesn't blow all the time, and the sun doesn't shine all the time," Richmond said.

Do you have a story to share about your utility bills? Contact these reporters at [email protected] and [email protected].

• Real estate is attracting more young people to the profession.
• The share of realtors under the age of 30 quadrupled in 2024, NAR data shows.
• The trend has been helped by record-high home prices and the allure of being one's own boss.

Young, fresh-faced 20-somethings are taking the housing market by storm — not by buying homes, but by selling them.

After dipping in 2023, the share of realtors under the age of 30 quadrupled in 2024, rising from 1% to 4% last year, according to registration data from the National Association of Realtors.

Meanwhile, the median age of the average real estate agent dropped from 60 to 55 last year, the lowest since 2021.

It's a lucrative time to get into the business. While new rules have affected how realtors' commissions work, real estate agents and brokers still made a collective $48 billion in revenue in the third quarter of last year, about double what they made 10 years ago.

Paydays are being boosted by soaring home prices. The median sale price of a home was about $419,000 in the fourth quarter of 2024 — up 27% since the start of 2020.

Business Insider spoke to three realtors who dove into the property business early, with some obtaining their license as soon as they turned 18, or pausing college studies to do so.

Many described themselves as especially entrepreneurial and seeking an alternative to a typical desk job — and said they found the work rewarding, both on a financial and a personal level.

Marios Milonas, a real-estate agent based in New York, started in the business when he was 19 and looking for direction in his career. He wanted nothing to do with a regular 9-to-5, and, in an effort to steer clear of student loans, was taking classes at his local community college.

"I just felt like I wanted to be able to experience financial freedom," he said, adding that he shied away from the idea of being forced into a job just to pay of student debt.

His girlfriend's father, who had worked in real estate for more than 20 years, recommended he try it out. After a few weeks of coursework, he got his license and soon after dropped out of community college.

The market was tough, at first. Milanos didn't sell a single home for his first year in the business, he said, pointing to the pandemic.

His "baby face" also held him back, he said, recalling offhand comments from other professionals in the business.

"One person came in and said, 'Oh, I thought you were 13 years old," Milanos said.

The comments began to subside as he began to grow more confident and worked on appearing more knowledgeable in front of his clients. Once the housing market began to heat back up, he felt things finally coming together.

"When that housing market opened up, it was crazy," he said, adding that he began making a six-figure salary when he was 21 years old. Milonas made over $300,000 in commission in 2024, according to financial statements viewed by BI.

Chloe De Verrier, a 26-year-old realtor based in Los Angeles, also began working on getting her real estate license when she was 19. At the time, she was attending UCLA and felt unsure about her career path. She did, though, know that she wanted to run her own business, and have full control over her schedule. Real estate seemed like the right fit.

"I was kind of having that, I guess, quarter-life crisis of, 'I don't know what I want to do,'" she said. "I kind of just decided to take a leap of faith."

She decided to temporarily drop out of college and pursue real estate full-time. Her first official day in business was her 21st birthday.

It also took De Verrier eight months to sell her first home, which she attributes to the pandemic and the fact that she was just starting out in the industry. In the meantime, she lived off her savings and moonlighted as a restaurant hostess for extra cash.

"It was just a complete shit show," she said. "I would do real estate all day during the day, go to my night shift. And it would be funny because clients would call me when I was on shift, and so I would make some excuse to go to the bathroom or step into the alleyway to negotiate deals."

At times, she also doubted herself because of her age.

"Who's going to trust a 20-something-year-old to buy or sell their biggest asset?" De Verrier said.

But for the most part, people don't seem to care about how young she was. De Verrier says clients typically trust her because she's knowledgeable and does her best to come across as professional.

"To this day, people are like, you look 23, but you act [older]," she said. "Looking back, I don't think it was as big of a deal as I made it out to be in my head."

De Verrier made over $100,000 last year, according to documents viewed by BI.

Joseph Khateri, a 21-year-old real-estate agent in Virginia, said he got his real estate license when he was 18, but he was dabbling in real estate long before that. Khateri helped his immigrant parents read documents and sell their home twice when he was younger.

The last time Khateri helped his parents move, the realtor who sold them their house in Virginia told him to think about getting into the real estate business. Afer obtaining his license, he plunged into the real estate business full-time, working as many as 80 hours a week his first few years.

Khateri described his approach to real-estate as a kind of game, adding that he worked doggedly to bring up his hourly rate, or what his salary would be if he were paid by the hour.

It was tough going, though. It took Khateri around six months to sell his first home. His commission, when subtracting fees from his brokerage and other work-related expenses, came out to a rate of around $2 an hour.

"I was just losing money every month," he said. "My parents were like, 'Joseph, what are you doing?'"

He, too, said he had trouble doing deals because of his age. "Ageism is a very big thing with real estate," he said.

Since then, things have picked up. Last year, Khateri made around $70,000 from his real estate business alone, which includes his income from commission, referrals to clients, and consulting, statements viewed by BI show.

The Gen Z realtors who spoke to BI said they all want to stick with real estate, even if its just as a side hustle.

Milonas, who grew up in a working-class family in Queens, said he planned on scaling his business and building generational wealth through his real estate ventures.

Khateri picked up a full-time job as a software engineer last year and said he would continue to work in real estate on the side. Money is part of the reason why, he admits, as he's a close follower of the Financial Independence, Retire Early movement. He said expects to make $200,000 in income this year. But for the most part, he just finds real estate fun.

"I'm a huge money guy, numbers guy, heavily into finance. I simply just like helping people with their investments. It's honestly fun for me," he said.

De Verrier said she would also stay in the industry, with plans to potentially build her own team of agents one day.

"I don't know what else I would do, honestly," she said.

• Duolingo staged its owl mascot's death for a marketing stunt — except in Japan.
• The campaign reflects Duolingo's non-traditional and country-specific marketing.
• Marketing efforts helped boost daily active users by 51% and revenue by 41% in the fourth quarter.

In an elaborate marketing campaign this month, Duolingo seemingly killed its viral green owl mascot in every country but one.

"Duo, our owl, faked his death in every single market that we had except for Japan," Luis von Ahn, the company's CEO, said on an earnings call on Thursday. "It turns out that in Japan, joking about death is not as kosher. So, in Japan, he was just not dead."

In an early February campaign, the language learning app announced the "death" of its mascot with a sassy statement. In a post on X, the company wrote: "Authorities are currently investigating his cause of death and we are cooperating fully. Tbh, he probably died waiting for you to do your lesson, but what do we know."

Pop singer Dua Lipa replied to the X post, and wrote: "Til' death duo part," a reference to a long-standing joke about Duo being in love with the artist.

The company went all in: The app's thumbnail depicted the mascot dead with crossed eyes and his tongue sticking out, and Duolingo's social handles mourned his death in a series of posts.

On Thursday's call, von Ahn said Duo returned last week from faking his death because users completed enough language lessons to bring him back.

The campaign reflected the company's famous nontraditional and country-specific marketing campaigns, which have made the owl mascot and the Duolingo app cultural icons.

Duolingo's social media accounts for countries like India, Germany, and France feature hyper-local content based on news events, memes, and trends, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers in each of these countries. Duolingo's Japan Instagram page has posts in Japanese and anime-style art, and they feature Duo participating in local trends.

Last quarter, Duolingo became the first company to use animation to deliver prepared remarks on an earnings call, emphasizing its artificial intelligence push. A company representative told Business Insider that the video would have taken weeks to create with human animators, but generative AI did the job in less than seven minutes.

The company spent $25.6 million on sales and marketing in the quarter that ended in September, up from $22.3 million in the same period in 2023. Breakdowns for the most recent quarter were not available at press time.

"We believe that our unhinged and viral marketing campaigns — like our 5-second Super Bowl ad, Duolingo on Ice, and 'Owl Game' partnership with Netflix — contributed to our user growth and the growth of our iconic brand," the company wrote in a shareholder letter released Thursday.

Daily active users — an important measure for consumer apps — jumped by 51% in the fourth quarter to 40.5 million.

Fourth quarter revenue grew 41% to $209 million, beating analyst expectations of $205 million.

Duolingo's stock fell over 7% in after-hours trading. The stock is up 57% in the past year.

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is having a huge impact on cervical cancer prevention among young women, a U.S. government report published Thursday suggests.

Why it matters: The CDC report showing rates of precancerous lesions among women aged 20-24 screened for cervical cancer from 2008-2022 fell by about 80% comes days after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who once called the HPV vaccine "dangerous and defective," was confirmed as health and human services secretary.

• During questioning from senators ahead of his confirmation, Kennedy said he was divesting his financial interest in legal challenges against Gardasil, an HPV vaccine made by Merck.

By the numbers: Human papillomavirus is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S. and the virus is responsible for some 10,800 cases of cervical cancer every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Zoom in: The CDC report found drops in precancerous lesion rates in other age groups screened, falling 37% among women who were 25 to 29 years old for the same period.

• "Observed declines in cervical precancers are consistent with HPV vaccination impact and support Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations to vaccinate children against HPV at age 11–12 years with catch-up through age 26 years," the CDC said.
• "The data are consistent with a considerable impact from the U.S. HPV vaccination program on cervical precancers, with the largest decreases in the youngest age group for which benefit of vaccination would first be observed."

The bottom line: The CDC findings add to growing global evidence that the uptake vaccine is helping to cut cases of cervical cancer.

• Cancer-prevention researcher Jane Montealegre told AP the rise in uptake of the safe, effective HPV vaccine can be credited for the substantial drop in precancerous lesions.
• "This should reassure parents that they're doing the right thing in getting their children vaccinated against HPV," added Montealegre, of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

Go deeper: FDA cancels meeting to pick flu vaccine strains for next winter

Editor's note: This article has been updated with more details from the report.

• Joe Gebbia is a cofounder and former chief product officer of Airbnb.
• On Thursday, Gebbia said he had joined Elon Musk's government efficiency commission, DOGE.
• Gebbia also sits on Tesla's board.

Joe Gebbia, the cofounder and former chief product officer of Airbnb, said on Thursday that he would be a part of Elon Musk's government efficiency commission, DOGE.

"Excited to share I'm bringing my designer brain and start-up spirit into the government," Gebbia wrote in an X post on Thursday.

Gebbia wrote in his post that his first project at DOGE will be to improve the "slow and paper-based retirement process" for federal employees. Musk had previously complained about how retirement applications were being processed manually and using paper records.

Musk told reporters at a press conference in the Oval Office on February 11 that he was told that only a maximum of 10,000 federal employees could retire every month because of the manual process.

"Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual, on paper. It's manually calculated then written down on a piece of paper, then it goes down a mine," Musk said.

"Yeah, there's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork," Musk added.

Musk was referring to a converted mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania. The mine was originally owned by US Steel and has been used to store government records since the 1960s.

The Office of Personnel Management's then-chief information officer, Guy Cavallo, said in an interview with Federal News Network last year that it would take "many years" to replace the paper-based system with an online platform they were testing.

"Since leaving my operating role at Airbnb in 2022, I've been looking for the next digital design challenge. And I can think of few more important ones than volunteering to improve the user experience within our government," Gebbia wrote in his X post on Thursday.

Gebbia's post came attached with a video from the OPM, which said that the agency had processed an entire retirement application digitally for the first time. Chuck Ezell, the OPM's acting director, said in the video that the application was processed within a week. The process would take 64 days on average if done manually.

"If anyone else in good standing wants to help design beautiful, user-friendly digital products, reach out," Gebbia added.

"Thanks!" Musk wrote in response to Gebbia's post.

Representatives for DOGE did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

This is the first time Gebbia has confirmed his involvement with DOGE. On February 13, The New York Times reported that Gebbia was set to join DOGE, though Gebbia declined to comment when approached by the Times.

It is unclear if Gebbia will be paid for his work at DOGE. Earlier this month, the White House said that Musk is a "special government employee" and isn't paid for his service.

Gebbia has a good relationship with Musk and has been a Tesla board member since 2022. In June, Gebbia told Reuters in an interview that Musk had discussed buying a home from his startup, Samara.

On January 19, a day before President Donald Trump's inauguration, Gebbia said in an X post that he had voted for Trump even though he had been voting for the Democrats his "whole life." The Democratic Party "aren't the same party they used to be," Gebbia wrote.

"Like your fashion sense, they've lost their way. Hopefully they'll make an effort to win people like me back," he added.