Elon Musk Was Once A Microsoft Intern — Now His Company Is Bringing Grok To Azure: ‘Incredibly Important For AI To Be Grounded In Reality,’ xAI CEO Tells Satya Nadella – Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA)
Tesla Inc. TSLA CEO Elon Musk returned to his Microsoft Corporation MSFT roots on Monday, joining CEO Satya Nadella at “Build 2025” to announce the integration of xAI’s Grok into Azure — a full-circle moment for the tech billionaire who once interned at the software giant.
What Happened: Speaking for a brief chat at Microsoft’s annual developer conference, Nadella welcomed Musk, recalling his early connection to the company.
“I know you started off as an intern at Microsoft. You were a Windows developer and of course, you’re a big PC gamer still,” Nadella said.
Musk reflected on those early days, saying, “I had one of the early IBM PCs with MS-DOS… I programmed video games in DOS, and then later in Windows. Remember Windows 3.1?”
See Also: Microsoft To Cut 6,000 Jobs Globally Amid AI-Driven Shift, Says Changes Necessary To ‘Best Position The Company For Success’
The conversation quickly turned to AI, as the two tech leaders introduced Grok’s integration with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
Musk shared insights into Grok 3.5 — xAI’s newest model, highlighting its foundation in physics-based reasoning.”It’s incredibly important for an AI model to be grounded in reality… I’ve not seen anyone break the laws of physics.”
Musk also highlighted Grok’s real-world applications in Tesla, SpaceX and customer service, where its performance has already shown promise. “You can yell at it, and it’s still going to be very nice,” he joked.
Nadella added, “Cracking the physics of intelligence is perhaps the real goal for us to be able to use AI at scale.”
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Why It’s Important: Microsoft has become one of the earliest major cloud providers to offer managed access to Grok. Through its Azure AI Foundry platform, Microsoft will make both Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini available with the same service-level guarantees it provides for its other products.
Customers will also receive billing directly from Microsoft, consistent with how other AI models are offered on the platform.
However, according to The Verge, this unexpected decision may stir controversy due to Microsoft’s strong partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI. The report also noted that Nadella has been advocating within the company to bring Grok onboard, aiming to position Microsoft as the go-to platform for hosting the most widely used AI models.
Interestingly, Musk has previously taken pot shots at the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI — the AI company he co-founded in 2015 but exited in 2018. He has repeatedly said that Microsoft holds too much influence over OpenAI.
In 2023, Nadella pushed back on Musk’s allegation, saying that Microsoft holds a non-controlling stake and describing the relationship as a strong commercial partnership.
Price Action: On Monday, Microsoft stock rose by 1.01%, closing at $458.87. It saw a slight additional uptick of 0.028% in after-hours trading, according to Benzinga Pro data.
Benzinga Edge Stock Rankings give Microsoft a growth score of 65.72%. Click here to see how it stacks up against other major stocks like Tesla.
Shutterstock/Joshua Sukoff
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
