Elon Musk Recalls Microsoft Internship Days In Conversation With Satya Nadella

Elon Musk and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently shared a light-hearted yet insightful conversation as they announced the arrival of xAI's flagship Grok 3 models on Microsoft Azure. The AI models will be available for free throughout June on the Azure AI Foundry, which also hosts offerings from OpenAI, Meta, Hugging Face and other key players in the AI space.

Welcoming Grok to Azure during the Microsoft Build developer conference, Nadella took a moment to reminisce about Musk's early tech days. "I know you started off as an intern at Microsoft," Nadella said, referring to Musk's stint as a Windows developer. "You were a PC gamer then-and still are."

Musk responded with a smile, recalling, "I actually started before Windows-with DOS. I worked on the earliest IBM PCs with MS-DOS. They had 128k of memory, and when it went up to 256k, that was a big deal." He added that he used to program video games in DOS before moving on to Windows 3.1.

Here is the full conversation today between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and @elonmusk.

Elon: "With Grok 3.5, which is about to be released, it's trying to reason from first principles." pic.twitter.com/fqaevjKCXj

— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) May 19, 2025

The conversation, shared by both leaders on social media, offered a rare glimpse into Musk's early programming background, just as the two tech titans discussed the future of AI. Nadella praised xAI's Grok as "a family of models that are both responsive and capable of reasoning," adding that he's excited about its potential on Azure.

Musk elaborated on his vision for the Grok 3.5 model, saying it's designed to reason from first principles. "If you're trying to get to fundamental truths, it boils down to identifying axiomatic elements most likely to be correct-and reasoning from there," he explained. "The focus of Grok 3.5 is fundamental physics and applying those tools across reasoning domains, aspiring to truth with minimal error."

The collaboration marks a significant moment in the evolving AI landscape, as Musk's xAI expands its reach through one of the world's largest cloud platforms.