Elon Musk to set up 'MacroHard', an AI software firm to take on Microsoft

World's richest man Elon Musk, has envisioned a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) software firm.

Musk announced his ambitious project dubbed 'Macrohard', the opposite name of his rival software giant, Microsoft.

Musk revealed in his message on the X platform that Macrohard is a tongue-in-cheek name, which he first coined in 2021 to take a jab at Microsoft. He had again used it to mock Microsoft's service outage in July 2024, which caused widespread service disruption in international airports and government services worldwide.

Now, Musk has gotten serious about starting the Macrohard firm for real. He asked interested candidates to join xAI to help build a pure AI software company.

"Join @xAI and help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard. 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," said Elon Musk on X.

It can be noted that Musk, while responding to Microsoft CEO announcing the launch of ChatGPT-5 had jokingly said that the company which is bankrolling OpenAI will eventually 'be eaten alive' by the latter.

To that, Nadella gave a befitting reply with a witty jab at Musk. He said Microsoft's Azure is happy to be the official cloud server platform to run the Grok 4 AI app and looks forward to the new Grok 5 series.

"People have been trying for 50 years, and that's the fun of it! Each day you learn something new and innovate, partner, and compete. Excited for Grok 4 on Azure and looking forward to Grok 5!".

Screen-grab Satya Nadella witty reply to Elon Musk on X platform.

The witty reply from Nadella may have propelled Musk, like many Billionaires, who are known to have a strong persona, to get serious on setting up Macrohard to take on Microsoft.

Like his other firms, Musk's Macrohard is likely to have a lean team of talented engineers. We have seen how Musk, when he took over Twitter (now X platform), downsized the company by 50 per cent. Many criticised the move as it would be unsustainable to run such a big corporate company with fewer people, but look at it now, it is thriving well. It suffered a decline in revenue initially, but in 2025, it has rebounded.

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