Elon Musk appoints former Morgan Stanley executive as CFO of xAI and X: FT

[Artificial Intelligence AI Assistant Apps - DeepSeek, xAI Grok, OpenAI ChatGPT]
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Elon Musk has appointed former Morgan Stanley executive Anthony Armstrong as chief financial officer of both his artificial intelligence startup xAI and social media platform X, the Financial Times reported [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-07/elon-musk-names-ex-morgan-stanley-banker-cfo-of-xai-ft-says].

Armstrong, who advised Musk during his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter (now X), will take on a central role in overseeing the finances of both ventures. His appointment comes as Musk looks to revive X’s financial health and scale up operations at xAI.

Musk — who also leads Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/TSLA]), SpaceX (SPACE [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/SPACE]), and Neuralink — has been aggressively investing in AI infrastructure as competition intensifies with rivals such as Microsoft-backed (MSFT [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/MSFT]) OpenAI [https://seekingalpha.com/news/4500035-openais-h1-revenue-climbs-16-to-43-billion---report], Alphabet (GOOGL [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/GOOGL]) (GOOG [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/GOOG]), and Meta Platforms (META [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/META]), all of which are pouring billions into data centers [https://seekingalpha.com/news/4497243-nvidia-plans-to-invest-up-to-100b-in-openai-progressively-to-build-ai-data-centers] and model development.

Just last month, xAI secured funding at a $200 billion valuation [https://seekingalpha.com/news/4496701-elon-musks-xai-raises-10b-at-200b-valuation---cnbc], making it one of the most valuable startups in the world. However, according to Bloomberg News, the company is reportedly losing around $1 billion per month, largely due to high infrastructure and compute costs.

Most recently, xAI unveiled its new reasoning model [https://seekingalpha.com/news/4497201-musks-xai-unveils-new-reasoning-model-grok-4-fast], known as Grok 4 Fast.

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