Elon Musk publicly took a dump on one of his underlings for the unthinkable crime of using the word “researcher.”

At the receiving end of his boss’s wrath was Aditya Gupta, an employee at Musk’s AI startup xAI. “We at [xAI] are looking for researchers and engineers,” Gupta tweeted Tuesday, with a link to a job posting.

Apparently having gotten up on the wrong side of bed, Musk took extreme umbrage with this benign statement of fact.

“This false nomenclature of ‘researcher’ and ‘engineer’, which is a thinly-masked way of describing a two-tier engineering system, is being deleted from @xAI today,” he fumed in a quote tweet. “There are only engineers. Researcher is a relic term from academia.”

The billionaire multi-hyphenate wouldn’t conclude before bloviating about how awesome his companies are.

“SpaceX does more meaningful, cutting-edge ‘research’ on the advancement of rockets and satellites than all the academic university labs on Earth combined,” Musk added. “But we don’t use the pretentious, low-accountability term ‘researcher’.”

“Engineer,” he wrote in a final sentence, at no point acknowledging the employee he was making an example of.

This was clearly an impulsive decision by Musk. For one, the “careers” section of the xAI website still reads: “We are a team of AI researchers and engineers on a mission to build AI systems…” 

In the job posting, the description also refers to the role as an “AI engineer and researcher.” The division is labelled as “engineering & research.” The job asks for someone with a “background in AI research.” 

There is, in sum, a lot of “research” involved with this job, which Musk now insists is absolutely not a researcher position. So what did Gupta do wrong here, exactly? Was he supposed to know that invoking the specter of “researchers” was some kind of cardinal sin?

Of course, it’s no secret that Musk can be a jerk to his employees. He was notorious for his rage firings at his automaker Tesla, and one former engineer there alleged that he threatened to deport her entire team for pointing out a serious safety flaw with one of his cars.

This isn’t even the first time Musk has tried to publicly humiliate an employee, either. Following his takeover of X, formerly Twitter, Musk mocked a now ex-employee named Haraldur Thorleifsson for his disability, accusing him of using his muscular dystrophy diagnosis to get out of work. Following backlash, Musk eventually apologized to Thorleifsson and deleted some of his remarks.

As for Gupta, he opted to take it all on the chin (and probably to keep his job). “Correction: looking for solid engineers,” he wrote, after Musk’s upbraiding.

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