Jack Garabedian, a SpaceX engineer who built out Starlink deployments during the Russia-Ukraine war, is now running the team that trains Grok. Bloomberg reported the move on June 9, noting that Garabedian replaces Diego Pasini, who had led Grok training for roughly eighteen months.
This is not an isolated hire. A cohort of Starlink executives has moved into xAI across policy, operations, and engineering leadership. The pattern is deliberate: Musk is staffing xAI with operators proven inside SpaceX’s infrastructure business rather than AI-native researchers.
The timing points to motive. SpaceX’s IPO is approaching, and presenting xAI as an operationally mature infrastructure company fits that story better than a frontier research lab run by early-career AI engineers. Garabedian’s prior work integrating Grok into Starlink customer support already links the two businesses at the product level.
Teams watching xAI’s compute rental agreements with Anthropic and Google should read this personnel pipeline as the same thesis applied to people: xAI is being built for public markets, not just model benchmarks.
Bloomberg (bloomberg.com), 2026-06-09.
