The Twins Pushing Elon Musk’s Plans to Replace X Staff With Grok

Last month, Elon Musk’s X laid off half of the engineering team tasked with building and running systems to fight spam, influence campaigns and illegal content, among other trust and safety issues, according to two people with direct knowledge of the cuts. The team had already been whittled down to less than 20 people before the layoffs, compared to more than 100 from before Musk acquired the company, then known as Twitter, in 2022, according to the people.

The layoffs reflected Musk’s desire to replace as much of X’s engineering systems as possible with xAI’s large language model, Grok, including the site’s recommendation algorithm and advertising targeting system. To oversee the transition, Musk has installed two engineers from xAI—two twin brothers originally from Ukraine, Dima and Ievgin Soboliev, the people said. (xAI acquired X in March.)