Billionaire Elon Musk is batting away criticism that his artificial intelligence venture xAI has a talent retention problem, insisting the startup is doing just fine on the people front.

The 50% Attrition Debate

The discourse started when user Varunram Ganesh posted on X over the weekend, sharing a screenshot of an employee announcing their exit from xAI after just six months. "Attrition at xAI within the year seems to be at least 50%," Ganesh wrote.

To be clear, attrition rate measures how many employees leave an organization during a specific time period, whether they're shown the door or walk out voluntarily.

Another user, @satyanutella_, piled on by quoting the post and contrasting Musk's current approach with his earlier hiring prowess. The user praised "young" Elon as "the best tech recruiter ever," pointing to the Tesla Inc. (TSLA) CEO's past advice on talent acquisition. But the sentiment soured quickly: Musk "fell off" in the 2020s, the user argued, adding that "xAI talent and retention is way worse than all his previous projects."

Musk's Defense: We're Accelerating Fast

Musk wasn't about to let that slide. He responded by saying xAI has experienced "very few regretted departures" and emphasized the company's breakneck expansion pace. "We are accelerating faster than any other AI organization on Earth, despite being a much smaller team," Musk declared.

Burning Cash at Scale

Whatever you think about the talent situation, there's no denying xAI is spending money like it's going out of style. The company is reportedly burning through close to $1 billion every month to build out its AI infrastructure. Over the first nine months of last year alone, xAI dropped more than $7.8 billion on various investments. Against that backdrop, the company pulled in just $107 million in revenue and posted a $1.46 billion loss in the September quarter.

The Departure Reality

Now, about those "very few" departures. Last year, xAI laid off over 500 workers from its data annotation team as part of a workforce restructuring and a strategic shift toward specialist tutors for its AI model Grok. And in a particularly notable exit, xAI's CFO Mike Liberatore left after spending a mere three months in the role. So maybe the attrition concerns aren't entirely unfounded.