Who is Diego Pasini? Elon Musk’s xAI taps 20-year-old to run Grok team after firing over 500 employees

Elon Musk’s xAI had reportedly just gone through a round of sweeping layoffs, and now the company has hired a 20-year-old to lead its data annotation team, according to a report by Business Insider. The team is responsible for training Grok AI and is made up of contractual and full-time staffers who label, categorize, and contextualize raw data in order to teach Grok how to better understand the world.

​The 20-year-old boss of the data annotation team is Diego Pasini, who graduated high school in 2023, the same year xAI was founded.

​Pasini took over the team reportedly after at least nine high-level employees had their Slack accounts deactivated last week. Soon afterward, the company is said to have cut over 500 jobs.

​Pasini then held an all-hands meeting with the team’s remaining members and assured them that xAI did not have any further plans for layoffs, but another 100 workers were let go shortly thereafter.

​Since then, Pasini’s team has reportedly held rapid-fire one-on-one meetings with the remaining employees and asked them to explain their work at the company. The 20-year-old also posted an announcement in Slack, asking workers to focus on a series of tests that would determine their future at the company.

​Who is Diego Pasini?

​Prior to joining xAI, Pasini attended the University of Pennsylvania where he studied computer science and economics, as per his LinkedIn profile. Pasini has listed his presence at the university as “on leave.”

​He attended a high school in New Jersey called the Pingry School, which has annual tuition fees of over $47,000. During his time at the school, Pasini was part of the robotics team and also presented research on drones at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022.

​He is also listed as a 2024 fellow at the investment firm Contrary, which claims to have worked with companies like Anduril and Replit. As per his fellowship profile, he was “excited about the future of robotics and hard tech startups.”

​Pasini was followed by Elon Musk in early September after the techie began posting on X (formerly Twitter) in support of the billionaire.

​He joined xAI in January after winning a hackathon organized by xAI in San Francisco. Two other people on his team also went on to work at xAI and Tesla.