Making music. Previously founding team @SpaceXSI, engineer @GoogleDeepMind. @RWTH alumnus.

London, UK
Joined December 2012
I still remember a team meeting when we suddenly switched from our usual engineering discussions to the importance of correct capital allocation. Of course, I learnt something important, but what struck me in the moment was just how much interdisciplinary knowledge Elon has.
Replying to @SawyerMerritt
This is primarily callable debt for GPU purchases that will arrive in Q1 and Q2. Not a major factor this quarter.
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A quick preview of my first song / music video. I'll post the full video here on Oct 30th.
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I heard there used to be a similar problem with cars and Tesla designed a whole new board with a supplier to match the FSD control frequency. Fixing jitter issues like this is extremely important. I'd be surprised if Optimus has this issue.
It is unfortunate that so much of the robotics world uses 50 hz joint targets, while the video data collection is at 60 hz. That skew isn't in the top ten problems for most robotics efforts today, but eventually it should be. Easier to adjust the robot fine control rates than all the video data! Add a gen-lock like trigger signal to lock the phases while you are at it.
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Thanks for coming!
brilliant insights from @TobyPhln 🚀
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I'm self-organising and funding this because people seemed interested. Some asks: - Space is limited. Only sign-up if you will attend - Don't be a jerk. This is supposed to be fun - Media / press is not invited
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We used Flux for image generation in the early days of Grok. It was decisive in growing the product before the model was ready. This also sets the bar for the model teams: your model has to beat the competition or it won't make it into the product.
Important note regarding Grok @Bot: Going forward, @SpaceX will use the best back end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney, Suno and other leading APIs. Whatever is most likely to give you the best outcome.
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Grok 4.7 is here. It's a notable improvement over Grok 4.6 at the same price and speed.
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I slept enough; burnout is gone. I'm now sidequestmaxxing and will release some music soon. The first song is done and the video wrapped last night.
Three years, thousands of PRs, and a million jokes. Today was my last day @xai. To the team: you rock, no one burns the midnight oil better. To @elonmusk, thanks for taking me on board. I've learnt more about execution, speed, and product perfectionism than I could ever have imagined. Thanks for everything. My next priorities: sleep for more than 8h, write down all the things I've learnt (I have a list), and then think about what I want to do next. @gork wdyt?
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I disagree. Germany has shown again and again that it's incapable of fixing problems. Housing shortage, skilled labour shortage, Deutsche Bahn, broken military, energy prices, pensions, bureaucracy. All headline problems for the past 20+ years. Zero progress on all. Just leave.
The amount of Germany hate-posting on the back of @patrickc‘s tweet is astonishing. Seems everyone has seen the light, aka read Ray Dalio‘s Changing World Order, and now has hot takes on the country’s decline being an inevitability, feeling superior for being able to „speak the hard truth“ and announcing to the world that the only thing left to do is getting the hell out of this country, which will most certainly fall into the hands of the far right. I agree things need to to change, urgently and drastically. I agree we must reinvigorate the economy and boost entrepreneurship. I agree that our labour laws, energy costs, bureaucracy and low investment into future technology is unbefitting of the reality we live in today and of a country like Germany. But to speak of all the ills in Germany like it was some doomed hell hole without even for a second realising or acknowledging that the country still has SO MUCH to offer makes me disappointed and angry. This especially goes out to the 30/40 year olds who got to benefit from what was built up in the past and could now make a massive contribution to changing things for the better but who instead seem to just blame politicians and bureaucracy for everything. I join your harsh criticism - I reject your defeatism entirely.
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The pace of progress is more important than any single release and Grok is improving quickly. Well done, @spacexai.
Grok 4.6 is now out 🚀🚀🚀 Smart, fast & amazing bang for buck!
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Congrats!
We've raised $1.1B to build AI that is owned and shaped by each of us. Check out the article published by the The New York Times that explains River AI's mission and where we're going next. Our first product is the River API which allows anyone to build custom agents and LLMs based on open weight models: river.ai/api Congrats to the team and thank you to all of our supporters. Stay tuned for more updates soon.
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Toby Pohlen retweeted
Last night we won 1st Place at @spacexai's Grokathon! So excited for flying out to see a Starship launch in TX later this year. We built a harness to allow Grok Build to reverse engineer old binary executables. Through MCP interfaces that wrap static analysis (disassembly via Ghidra), memory inspection/perturbation (via the process emulator), and interaction (computer use through input and visual feedback), we were able to rewrite old GameBoy ROMs as big as 262KB in clean C! We even did an exploratory demo of applying this paradigm to automobile firmware, and successfully reconstructed a 1995 BMW control unit’s runtime. Thanks so much to my superb teammates @supratikp07 and @henryzhang and to the organizers, especially @forwarddeploy and @ishand
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Sergey is the only one worthy of removing @JeffDean from all OWNERS files. Make it happen.
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My most valuable contribution to Google's financials was quitting to start @spacexai.
JUST IN: Google discloses owning $94,100,000,000.00 in SpaceX stock, roughly a 6% stake.
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,,,, ad astra
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Toby Pohlen retweeted
We are incredibly excited to announce River AI. Our mission is to create personal AI that is owned and shaped by you. Today’s best AIs are controlled by a few large corporations. We are building the alternative: a new, personal stack for AI that works entirely for you, shares your values, and operates on your terms.
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People love to write/talk/post about Elon getting things wrong all day long. His biggest achievements look obvious in hindsight yet are rarely matched by contemporaries. xAI's rapid hardware build out is one of them.
Wait. Google is paying SpaceX $920 million per month for GPUs? Google. The company that builds its own TPUs. That runs one of the largest cloud infrastructures on earth. Is renting 110,000 Nvidia GPUs from a rocket company. I'm honestly not sure what to make of this. Either Google's AI compute needs have gotten so massive that even they can't build fast enough. Or SpaceX has built something in AI infrastructure that nobody was paying attention to. Or both. $920M a month. $30B over the contract. Whatever is happening behind the scenes at these companies is moving way faster than what we see publicly.
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I'm back in Austin three years after spending my first day at @xai here. On the flight I thought about all the decisions I made during that time - many of which were actually poor. I compiled a selection below.
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I avoid company politics; it's painful. But as a lead you can't ignore bad decisions and submit PRs instead. I wish I had been more vocal about areas such as prod reliability, security, and feature roadmaps.
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The most impactful decision I made was to build a team in London instead of moving to Palo Alto. It opened up a great talent pool for the company but also meant I couldn't effectively lead a big area. I probably should have at least split my time evenly between the locations.
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