Musk Shares Citadel CEO: AI Replacing PhD Jobs

Elon Musk reposted a clip of Citadel founder Ken Griffin speaking at Stanford University, where Griffin warned that agentic artificial intelligence is performing PhD-level finance research in hours or days and compressing work that once took weeks or months.

Griffin told students the AI toolkit has become ‘profoundly more powerful in about nine months’ and that agentic systems are automating tasks previously handled by master’s and PhD-level researchers at his hedge fund.

He described going home one Friday ‘fairly depressed’ after seeing the changes inside Citadel, calling the shift the first real AI impact at scale for his firm. ‘These are not mid-tier white-collar jobs. These are extraordinarily high-skilled jobs being automated by agentic AI,’ he added.

The comments come amid a broader pattern in 2026. Technology employers have cited AI as a factor in thousands of layoffs this year, and some companies are reorganizing into smaller teams that use AI tools rather than maintaining larger staff levels.

A review by a16z of four major studies found that AI has not yet eliminated jobs at scale and that displacement so far has focused on narrow tasks rather than entire occupations.

Several crypto-native firms and major technology companies are developing agent-based systems that can trade and settle autonomously, which could place complex trading and operational tasks under automated control.

Investors will watch upcoming corporate reports and earnings calls for evidence that firms can quantify productivity gains or cost reductions tied to AI. It is not yet clear whether Citadel or other finance firms will disclose how much capacity they have freed by assigning PhD-level work to agents.