Elon Musk's New Software Company Is the Opposite of Microsoft

Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest gooner, has a new software company. And in typical Musk fashion, he’s given it a name that only a teenager stuck in a 54-year-old’s body would truly appreciate.

The name is Macrohard, a play off the name Microsoft, and Musk knows it’s an immature joke about penises. But that kind of humor has never stopped him from raising billions of dollars before.

“Join @xAI and help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard,” the billionaire tweeted Friday. “It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real! In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI.”

It’s unclear what Musk means by insisting that Microsoft doesn’t “themselves manufacture any physical hardware.” Microsoft has products like Surface and Xbox, which are designed by the tech company. Microsoft oversees the manufacturing through various partners.

It’s also a bit odd to insist that any software company could be entirely simulated “with AI.” One person replying to Musk’s tweet asked the obvious question: “Does this mean all software-only companies – including xAI – are at risk of being fully disrupted?”

The theory seems to be that with the rise of AI, you can code anything you like, no matter how complicated, and just produce software essentially for free. And even if that were possible (it’s not, given the fact that AI still needs a human babysitter to debug), it seems like it would run into some major intellectual property issues.

xAI filed a trademark application for Macrohard on Aug. 1, according to online records held by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Musk first teased the name of his company in a tweet on July 13.

“We are creating a multi-agent AI software company @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 tweeted.

“This is a macro challenge and a hard problem with stiff competition! Can you guess the name of this company?” Musk continued, ending with a laughing emoji.

That tweet caused people online to guess correctly that it would be called Macrohard, perhaps because it’s been such a long-running joke in the software community. People speculated that it would be something related to gaming or vibe coding, which seems like a pretty solid bet, though we’re still waiting on details.

The trademark application mentions video games, but also seems to be trying to stake a claim in pretty broad fields, including “legal analysis, strategic planning, and professional advisory applications.”

xAI didn’t immediately respond to questions emailed on Friday. Gizmodo will update this article if we hear back.