On a cool evening in San Francisco, Elon Musk once again demonstrated his flair for the dramatic. Hosting a recruiting party for his latest startup, xAI, in the former headquarters of OpenAI—a company he cofounded and later left—Musk made it clear that he’s not just in the AI race; he intends to win it. His mission? To challenge the dominant players in the artificial intelligence space—OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic—and build an AI system that is both powerful and openly accessible, unlike what he characterizes as their “closed, for-maximum-profit AI” approach.