Elon Musk wasn’t kidding when he’d hinted that he was thinking of starting a new company named Macrohard.
xAI has filed a trademark for the name “Marcrohard”. The trademark was filed on 1st August, and is owned by xAI LLC. xAI paid $2,300 for 2 classes of the trademark.
“We are creating a multi-agent AI software company at xAI, where Grok spawns hundreds of specialized coding and image/video generation/understanding agents all working together and then emulates humans interacting with the software in virtual machines until the result is excellent,” Musk had posted on X on 14th July. “This is a macro challenge and a hard problem with stiff competition! Can you guess the name of this company?” he had added.
Musk’s phrasing — which called it a ‘macro’ challenge and a ‘hard’ problem — made users think that the company would be called Macrohard. When a user replied with “Macrohard” in the comments, to which Musk simply replied with a winking emoji.
It appears that Musk wasn’t kidding around, and indeed wants to set up a multi-agent AI software company. Musk’s post suggests that most of the code will be written by AI, and then it’ll be iteratively improved upon by AI agents which will judge the code, and then iteratively improve it.
But the name Macrohard is clearly a play on Microsoft. Musk has had a fractious relationship with Bill Gates. Musk had first clashed with Gates when he’d learnt that he had had shorted Tesla stock. More recently, Musk has attacked Gates after he’d claimed that DOGE would cost 2 million lives, calling him a “huge liar”. He’s also accused Gates of paying publications of writing negative pieces about him, and made fun of his physique. Most recently, Musk had highlighted Bill Gates’ relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and hinted that he’d be in his client list. And with Musk now thinking of starting a new company named “Macrohard”, it seems that he does seem to be serious about creating an AI-first possible software competitor to Microsoft.