• In a lawsuit, Elon Musk alleged OpenAI overpays as part of a pattern of anticompetitive practices.
• An analysis of salary data found that both companies offered pay well above typical industry wages for some roles.
• xAI paid one worker double the industry standard wage for the role; one OpenAI worker made over three times as much.

As the artificial-intelligence industry continues to attract attention, power, and billions of dollars in funding, two major players — Elon Musk's xAI and Sam Altman's OpenAI — are locked in a contentious battle over talent. Musk filed a lawsuit in August accusing Altman's company of offering "lavish compensation" to "starve competitors."

To examine Musk's claims about salaries, Business Insider analyzed wage data from specialty visa applications for each company from 2024. While both offered compensation well above typical industry wages for the handful of roles for which data was available, OpenAI paid some of its staff an even higher premium over standard rates.

The documentation that companies must file when hiring foreign workers on specialty visas like the H-1B provides a window into otherwise private compensation data at both firms and gives rare insight into the expensive war for AI talent.

xAI is only a fraction of the size of OpenAI; the company employs about 100 workers, compared with about 3,000 at OpenAI, PitchBook reported.

xAI reported pay data for 10 worker applications, compared with OpenAI's 86 worker applications. The companies paid 37% and 87%, respectively, above the typical industry wage — or "prevailing wage" — for the roles surveyed, based on data from US Customs and Immigration Services.

The prevailing wage is determined by the Department of Labor. It represents the average wage paid to workers in a particular occupation within a defined geographic area. Employers who hire workers on specialty visas like H-1Bs must pay them at least as much as the prevailing wage.

The data found that pay for the 10 xAI roles with specialty visa applications ranged from $250,000 to $500,000. At the top end, xAI paid one worker nearly double the prevailing wage for the role of principal machine learning engineer.

Among the 86 roles with available data on specialty visa applications, OpenAI paid between $145,000 and $530,000, with one member of the company's technical staff earning more than three times the prevailing wage for the role.

In the table above, BI compared the average salary for each job title included in the USCIS data for the two companies to the average prevailing wages for those titles.

The data offers some insight into how Musk's company approaches compensation amid a legal battle that has reignited the feud between Musk and Altman.

The pair cofounded OpenAI in 2015, and Musk was one of several Silicon Valley investors to collectively pledge $1 billion to the venture. He resigned from OpenAI's board of directors in 2018, citing a potential conflict of interest due to Tesla's work with artificial intelligence.

Since then, Musk has repeatedly bashed OpenAI and Altman, saying the company is "not what I intended at all." Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO earlier this year but withdrew the lawsuit, only to file a new suit in August. In addition to claims about OpenAI's allegedly anticompetitive practices, lawyers for Musk said that he was "deceived" and "manipulated" into cofounding the company.

"This suit is the latest move in Elon Musk's increasingly blusterous campaign to harass OpenAI for his own competitive advantage," OpenAI's attorneys wrote in motion to dismiss Musk's latest lawsuit. Since launching xAI Musk "has been trying to leverage the judicial system for an edge," they added.

Musk, Altman, and representatives for xAI and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.

Emails between Musk, Altman, and other OpenAI workers between 2015 and 2016 showed that Musk repeatedly emphasized the importance of recruiting top AI talent.

In the exchanges, which were included as part of Musk's most recent lawsuit, Musk wrote that recruitment should be OpenAI's "most important consideration," and the company should do "whatever it takes to bring on ace talent."

In April, Musk said xAI brought over a Tesla engineer after OpenAI began "aggressively recruiting" workers from the electric-car maker. Based on a review of LinkedIn profiles, xAI has hired at least nine former OpenAI employees, including xAI cofounder Igor Babuschkin, since Musk launched xAI in 2023.

Do you work for xAI or OpenAI? Reach out to the reporter via a non-work email and device at [email protected] or 248-894-6012

As thousands of employees prepared to move into Tesla's new Gigafactory outside Austin, Omead Afshar had to decide what kind of coffee they were going to drink.

Afshar, then operating as a chief of staff for CEO Elon Musk, was overseeing the construction of one of the largest vehicle-manufacturing facilities in the world. He approached picking which beans to brew in the break rooms with the same rigor he applied to more-consequential decisions.

"He had 20 different companies submit, and he went through all of them personally," one of his former skip-level reports said. "He wants everything to be perfect."

It has served him well. This October, Musk elevated Afshar to vice president of North American and European operations, cementing Afshar's status as one of the automaker's most important leaders.

The 38-year-old's rise to power comes at a critical moment for Tesla. The automaker faces increasing competition from other EV makers, slumping delivery numbers, and pressure from unions in both Germany and the US. It will also contend with the administration of President Donald Trump, who has brought Musk into his inner circle while simultaneously signaling plans to end electric-vehicle tax incentives, increase US oil production, and roll back emission standards.

As Musk increasingly turns his attention to politics, Afshar is set to help shepherd Tesla through this volatility.

A representative for Afshar declined to comment. Musk and Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the seven years he has spent working for Musk, Afshar has emerged as one of the billionaire's most loyal lieutenants, driven and singularly focused on his goals. Musk has long trusted Afshar's managerial capacity and attention to detail, four current and former colleagues say.

A former Tesla employee, Seth Sharp, said Afshar gave out his personal cellphone number and invited conversation with employees, adding that Afshar "always answered" Sharp's texts.

Afshar has thrived at a company with considerable executive turnover. Eight of Musk's direct reports have left Tesla over the past year, including Drew Baglino, the carmaker's senior vice president of powertrain and electrical engineering, and Rebecca Tinucci, the senior director of Supercharging.

In May, Tom Zhu stepped away from his duties overseeing global manufacturing in North America and Europe. Zhu, whom some have considered a potential successor to Musk, returned to his former position as Tesla's China chief.

In his new role, Afshar will be taking over many of Zhu's former responsibilities.

"Supporting Elon, who notoriously has a short fuse, isn't easy," Sharp said. "Omead has essentially proven he can stand close to the sun without getting burned."

Afshar, another former employee said, "is like the final boss on the way to Elon: Everything goes through him first." (This employee, as well as several others interviewed for this article, asked not to be named. Their identities are known to BI.)

Years before Tesla, Afshar studied biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and worked as a ski instructor. In 2009, several months after he graduated, Afshar, then 23, was driving in the Westlake Village neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Shortly after 11 p.m., Afshar lost control of the car. A local news report said he crossed into the median, knocked down several trees, and finally hit a larger tree.

Emergency personnel took Afshar and a passenger, a woman in her 20s, out of the car and to the hospital in critical condition, an incident report said. His cousin Behrad Vahidi told BI that Afshar had "kissed death" during the crash.

Afshar has never spoken publicly about the crash. But in a 2019 interview with his younger brother at an event for his alma mater, Afshar defended Tesla's mission of making driving safer and more sustainable.

Tesla, he said, is unfairly maligned by journalists reporting on crashes involving the company's vehicles. There are over 100 automobile deaths per day, he said, but if a Tesla "runs into someone's garage, that's going to be the headline."

Afshar seemed exasperated that some people couldn't grasp what he saw as the larger picture. At Tesla and other Musk companies, he said, "the mission is good, and what we're trying to do is right."

He joined the company in 2017 as a project manager in the office of the CEO in San Francisco. He moved to Texas in 2020 to oversee the construction of the Gigafactory, which he took from groundbreaking to grand opening in less than two years.

Bloomberg reported that there he was part of a project involving plans for a large glass structure. The Wall Street Journal reported that the project, known as "Project 42," was internally believed to involve building a glass house for Musk. Tesla launched an internal investigation into Project 42 in 2022, Bloomberg reported. The Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission also launched separate inquiries into Project 42, the Journal reported.

The status of those investigations is unclear. The SEC declined to confirm the existence of such an investigation. The DOJ declined a request for comment. Musk has previously said he does not plan to build a glass house.

The four current and former colleagues said Afshar became lower profile at Tesla in 2022 but continued to work closely with Musk. Afshar was named a vice president at SpaceX in late 2022. The Financial Times reported that Afshar also assisted with Musk's acquisition of Twitter, now X, and with cost-cutting initiatives at the social-media company in 2022 and 2023.

Records of text messages from Afshar to Musk, included in a lawsuit related to Musk's purchase of Twitter, underscore their close relationship.

"We all love you and are always behind you," Afshar wrote in April 2022, the day after Musk made an unsolicited offer to buy the social-media company. "Not having a global platform that is truly free speech is dangerous for all."

If Musk responded, there is no record of it in those court documents. Other court documents show that Afshar later invested in Twitter through a limited partnership.

Afshar had formally returned to Tesla by early 2024, five former employees said, though two of those people said Afshar was regularly operating in the background even before his official homecoming.

In recent photos of Afshar, he is nearly always at Musk's side: onstage at Tesla's Cyber Rodeo party; at a meeting with Tesla's manufacturing executives in Shanghai; and at a dinner for brainstorming robotaxi designs.

"Omead is similar to Elon: You have to be prepared to talk about anything or everything in a meeting with him," Afshar's former skip-level report said.

Like Zhu and Musk's family office manager Jared Birchall, Afshar has left barely a trace in the public record.

He's given only two known on-the-record interviews to journalists: one to Walter Isaacson, for his 2023 biography of Musk, and another to Time magazine when the publication named Musk "Person of the Year" in 2021. Election and campaign-finance records indicate Afshar has made no political contributions and has voted only once, in the most recent election.

Outside work, Afshar appears to lead a modest existence in line with his corporate reputation for cost-cutting and efficiency.

When he moved to Austin in 2020, he rented a one-bedroom apartment. That year he received $10 million worth of Tesla shares as a bonus, and in 2021 he paid $1.6 million for a newly constructed three-bedroom home in what a real-estate agent described in a listing as an "eclectic" neighborhood. For at least a year after Afshar moved in, the home across the street had broken windows and stripped siding.

Former colleagues said they observed occasional micromanaging tendencies in his Texas Gigafactory role, but they also emphasized his warmth amid Tesla's high-octane corporate culture.

Some workers praised Afshar for working to improve the employee experience, including buying Texas-style belt buckles to celebrate the factory's launch and planning a factorywide party after the site received a certificate of occupancy from the state.

In the 2019 interview with his brother, Afshar described his devotion to the automaker, saying he had missed birthdays and felt anxious about being away from his phone for even an hour.

Tesla, he said, was a good fit for him. "I like high-pressure environments," he said. "And this is definitely one of them."

Do you work for Tesla or have a tip? Reach out to the reporter via a non-work email and device at [email protected] or 248-894-6012