Vineeth Sendilraj, a 19-year-old Indian-origin computer science student at Georgia Tech, has announced that he has joined Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI as an engineer, describing the move as a “full circle moment”. His announcement comes days after he went viral following a widely shared clip from xAI’s December 2025 hackathon.Sendilraj first drew attention after images and video from the hackathon circulated online, showing him intensely chugging water in a packed room of engineers. While the moment was initially shared in a light-hearted way, the same hackathon images later became entangled in a wider online controversy after Nik Pash, then a senior AI executive at the tech firm Cline, posted a remark that many users condemned as racist and anti–South Asian.
Although Sendilraj had no involvement in the comment, his image appeared prominently in posts that circulated during the backlash, placing him at the centre of the online storm. The controversy eventually led to Pash’s dismissal from Cline, after the company said the remark did not reflect its values.A week after the viral episode, Sendilraj posted on X that he had been “clipped for drinking water” and was now joining xAI “to build the future of AI”, calling it a “full circle moment”. The post attracted significant attention and congratulatory replies, including messages from xAI employees. Sendilraj joined xAI after his team won first place at the company’s hackathon, where participants built projects using the X API. A Georgia Tech student focusing on artificial intelligence and high-performance systems, Sendilraj is also a prolific builder and content creator, with several projects and hackathon wins to his name.
