'Pretentious, low-accountability term': Musk drops 'researcher' title at xAI
30 Jul 2025

Elon Musk, the founder of xAI, has announced that his firm will no longer use the job title "researcher" for his employees.

The change followed a job listing shared by xAI employee Aditya Gupta, which mentioned openings for both "researchers" and "engineers."

Musk quickly responded, stating that the term "researcher" would no longer be used at the company, prompting an immediate update to the post.

Musk compares xAI to SpaceX
Industry parallels

Musk called the distinction between "researcher" and "engineer" a "thinly masked way of describing a two-tier engineering system," and said there are only engineers at his company.

He also compared xAI to SpaceX, his rocket manufacturing company. The billionaire stressed that "SpaceX does more meaningful, cutting-edge 'research' on the advancement of rockets and satellites than all the academic university labs on Earth combined."

"But we don't use the pretentious, low-accountability term 'researcher,'" Musk said.

OpenAI's approach to job titles
Similar strategies

Musk's stance on job titles isn't unique. OpenAI, the company he co-founded with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2015, has a similar approach for its technical hires.

In February 2023, Brockman revealed they didn't want to "bucket people into researchers and engineers" and had put a lot of thought into what job titles to use.

Eventually, they decided on "Member of Technical Staff."

Anthropic's stance on job titles
Title adoption

Anthropic, a company founded by former OpenAI employees, also uses the title "Member of Technical Staff" for all its research and engineering hires.

The company says on its website that all engineers are credited as authors on their research papers, often as first authors.