Elon Musk Launches ‘Macrohard’, A New Venture to Challenge Microsoft with AI-Driven Software

Elon Musk has unveiled a new venture, Macrohard, aimed at reshaping the software industry with the power of artificial intelligence. The founder of Tesla and xAI confirmed the news in a post on X and said that though the project may sound outlandish, “it is in fact very real.” The newly launched venture is expected to challenge Microsoft’s software empire by leveraging artificial intelligence.

xAI applied for a trademark for Macrohard with the US Patent and Trademark Office on August 1, reports note. The filing describes an ambitious range, including AI tools for speech and text generation, video game design, coding, and systems capable of analyzing images, video, and language. The filing suggests that Musk sees Macrohard as an AI-first ecosystem that might take on Microsoft’s control over productivity software, gaming systems, and coding instruments.

The name Macrohard itself is a tongue-in-cheek moniker that plays on Microsoft’s name. It may sound humorous, but Musk stressed the company’s work is serious. By defining the brand in opposition to Microsoft, Musk seems to distance his new venture from the incumbent software giant’s decades-long influence in technology.

At the heart of Macrohard are AI agents that can mimic human conversation. Musk has hinted that the system will use “hundreds of thousands of specialized agents” to improve coding and content generation until they, too, approach human quality. He referred to the project as a “macro challenge” and a “hard problem,” a clue to why the company was given its unusual name.

Musk’s relationship with Microsoft is still complex. On the one hand, he has criticized the company for becoming too reliant on OpenAI’s tech. On the other hand, he has collaborated with it, permitting Grok 3 models to operate in Azure AI. Musk had even called out Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella by name, predicting that OpenAI would one day “eat Microsoft from the inside out.” Instead, Nadella has eschewed confrontation, instead emphasizing the importance of cooperation in the rapidly growing field of AI.

Macrohard might represent the commercial face of xAI’s effort to compete with Microsoft’s Copilot ecosystem based on advanced versions of its Grok models. Musk has said Grok 4 and Grok 5 already beat the best of OpenAI, putting Macrohard in the position to commercialize those claims.