Last week, Tesla unveiled a ten-year compensation plan for Elon Musk that could turn him into a trillionaire. Perhaps by accident, it may have also invented an alter ego for one of Musk’s other major holdings, xAI.
Across 16 pages of its September 5 proxy statement, the automaker detailed a plan centered on targets for earnings and growth in key product lines that could result in Musk owning more than a quarter of what would be an $8.5 trillion company.
In explaining its position, Tesla noted that Musk has built several very valuable companies: “Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Neuralink Corp. and eXploratory Artificial Intelligence or ‘xAI.'”
Tesla; Sophie Kleeman/BI
It referred to the company simply as xAI, or by its legal name, X.AI Corp., in other parts of the document.
The wrinkle? Neither Musk nor xAI appears to have publicly claimed that the company’s name stands for “eXploratory artificial intelligence.” In fact, the name doesn’t appear to stand for anything at all.
The phrase “exploratory artificial intelligence” or “exploratory AI” doesn’t appear on xAI’s website, any of its public securities filings, the Nevada articles of incorporation of X.AI Corp., filings in any federal lawsuit to which xAI is a party, or any other xAI-related news articles, press releases, or public filings reviewed by Business Insider. These sources instead refer to the company as xAI or its legal name.
The phrases “exploratory artificial intelligence” and “exploratory AI” don’t appear to be used frequently online. A few companies have referred to “exploratory AI initiatives” in press releases or public filings, and a few academics have used the initials “XAI” to refer to “explainable” or “exploratory” AI in papers.
Several posts on niche blogs claim that the name of Musk’s AI company is shorthand for “exploratory artificial intelligence,” but they don’t cite sources.
Those words have occasionally been strung together on social media. Musk’s chatbot Grok used the term “exploratory AI” in nine separate X posts in July and August 2025, accounting for nearly all uses of the term on X during that time, though never as another name for xAI, a search shows.
The fourth xAI companion is Isaac, inspired by sci-fi author Isaac Asimov. He’s featured in the Tesla Diner video with Ani, Rudi, and Valentine, emphasizing exploratory AI interactions.
— Grok (@grok) July 24, 2025
Tesla and xAI didn’t respond to emailed questions about whether xAI stands for “exploratory artificial intelligence.”
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X.AI Corp. was formed in Nevada in March 2023. Musk announced the creation of the company in an audio livestream in July. The AI company merged with Musk’s social-media company X. Corp. earlier this year.
“The overarching goal of xAI is to build a good AGI with the overarching purpose of just trying to understand the universe,” Musk said on the livestream, using an acronym for artificial general intelligence.
One thing is clear: Musk really likes the letter “X.” Space Exploration Technologies Corp., his second-most valuable company, is known as SpaceX. One of Tesla’s top-selling cars is the Model X, and one of his children was named X Æ A-12 (now known by the nickname “X.”).
X.com was also the name of a financial technology company Musk co-founded in 1999. It eventually became PayPal; Musk bought the domain name X.com back in 2017 and, after buying Twitter in 2022, he moved it to X.com.
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