xAI quietly drops public accountability tag while Musk continues to feud with Altman’s OpenAI
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Elon Musk’s AI firm, xAI, officially gave up its public benefit corporation status in Nevada without announcing the move, even though the whole company was originally built around that label. Nevada filings confirmed that by May 9, 2024, xAI was no longer a PBC. The company also merged with X (formerly Twitter) on March 28, and the updated paperwork didn’t restore the benefit designation. This happened while Elon was still in court suing OpenAI and Sam Altman, accusing them of betraying their original nonprofit mission. The PBC label, which xAI started with in 2023, meant Elon had publicly promised to consider social good alongside profit, and to publish regular updates on the company’s non-financial progress. None of those updates were ever published. Then the label disappeared. And not even Elon’s attorney seemed to know. Marc Toberoff, his lawyer in the OpenAI lawsuit, filed a court document in May 2025 still calling xAI “a public benefit corporation founded by Musk to help accelerate scientific research via AI.” That was months after Nevada had already wiped the PBC status off the books. xAI ignores pollution rules at Memphis data center Right after it dropped the benefit corp tag, xAI fired up natural gas turbines at its new data center in Memphis, Tennessee, where it trains and runs the Grok chatbot. The firm and its energy provider, Solaris Energy Infrastructure, had promised to install pollution control systems on the turbines. That still hasn’t happened. A study from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville found that xAI’s operations added to existing air quality problems in the area. The NAACP filed a lawsuit accusing xAI of Clean Air Act violations. Executives at Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST), the nonprofit that pulled xAI’s corporate records from Nevada, said the company used the benefit…
Filed under: News - @ August 25, 2025 2:28 pm