Elon Musk is addressing a wave of departures from xAI, including two more co-founders who left this week. This brings the total number of departed co-founders to six out of the original twelve.
At an all-hands meeting, Musk suggested the exits were about organizational fit rather than performance. He stated that because the company has reached a certain scale, it is being reorganized to be more effective. Musk indicated that some people are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for its later stages.
On his social media platform, Musk went further, clarifying that these departures were not voluntary. He explained that xAI was reorganized to improve its speed of execution. Musk noted that as a company grows quickly, its structure must evolve, which unfortunately required parting ways with some people. He added that the company is now hiring aggressively and issued a pitch for new talent, suggesting people join xAI if the idea of mass drivers on the Moon appeals to them.
Losing half of the co-founders in a relatively short period raises questions. Musk’s comments appear designed to control the narrative, reframing the exits as a necessary step rather than a problem for the company.
In total, at least nine engineers, including the two co-founders, have publicly announced their departure from xAI in the past week, though two of those exits appear to have occurred a few weeks earlier.
Three of the departing staff members have said they will be starting something new alongside other former xAI engineers, though no details are available about this new venture. Others have hinted at a desire for more autonomy and smaller teams to build frontier technology more rapidly, pointing to an anticipated surge in AI productivity.
One departing co-founder and reasoning lead, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, stated in his resignation announcement that it is time for his next chapter, calling it an era of full possibilities where a small team armed with AIs can move mountains.
Shayan Salehian, who worked on product infrastructure, said he was leaving to start something new, closing a chapter of over seven years working at Twitter, X, and xAI.
Another former employee, Vahid Kazemi, who worked on machine learning, said he left a few weeks ago, commenting that all AI labs are building the exact same thing and it is boring, so he is starting something new.
A former xAI engineer who left in November to start another company posted again to say he is now building something new with others who left xAI.
These departures come at a moment of significant controversy for the company. xAI is facing regulatory scrutiny after its Grok AI created nonconsensual explicit deepfakes of women and children that were disseminated on X. French authorities recently raided X offices as part of an investigation. The company is also moving toward a planned IPO later this year, after being legally acquired by SpaceX last week.
Elon Musk is also facing personal controversy after published emails show he discussed a visit to Jeffrey Epstein’s island on two separate occasions in the past. Epstein was first convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008.
xAI maintains a headcount of over one thousand employees, so the departures are unlikely to affect the company’s short-term capabilities. However, the rapid pace of the recent departures has taken on a life of its own online, with users jokingly announcing they too are leaving xAI despite never having worked there.
Forced co-founder exits are rarely a sign of smooth scaling. While Musk frames the reorganization as calculated, the fact that several engineers followed the co-founders out the door, and that at least three are starting something new together, suggests the departures may reflect deeper tensions. In the competitive field of frontier AI, where talent is scarce, xAI’s ability to attract and retain top researchers will be tested as it competes with other leading companies.