You have other people in this thread talking about how xAI offers massive salaries to top talent so it sounds like they do exactly that. Have the money to both hire experts and buy the equipment. I don't even know why this is a discussion, by virtue of doing what they did they needed to hire experts and buy equipment.
They didn't hire the top talent in datacenter-building, because they had the expectation that they could buy a data center buildout. Sure, they hired top talent from other fields, to work other tasks, but that's unrelated to this.
Anyway, I don't have inside information on this, I'm just reciting what they announced publicly. If you want to argue that they in fact lied in the public announcement, and they secretly hired a bunch of datacenter-building-experts, then it's on you to show some proof for that claim.
