At least nine engineers, including two co-founders, have now publicly announced their departure from xAI in the past week, though two of those exits appear to have occurred a few weeks ago. Neither xAI nor Elon Musk have publicly commented on the departures. While attrition is typical at startups, co-founder departures are far less so. More than half of xAI’s founding team has now left, and the fact that several employees followed within days has intensified scrutiny around the company’s stability.
Three of the departing staff members say they will be starting something new alongside other former xAI engineers, although no details are available about the new venture. Others hint at a desire for more autonomy and smaller teams to build frontier tech more rapidly, pointing to the anticipated surge in AI productivity.
Yuhai (Tony) Wu, an xAI co-founder and reasoning lead, said in a post announcing his resignation that it is time for his next chapter. He described an era with full possibilities where a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.
Shayan Salehian, who worked on product infrastructure and model behavior post-training at xAI and previously worked at Twitter/X, said last week he was leaving to start something new. He expressed gratitude for his over seven-year chapter working at Twitter, X, and xAI, calling xAI an extraordinary place with an incredibly hardcore and talented team.
Valid Kazemi, who had a brief stint working on machine learning, posted that he left a few weeks ago. He added that in his opinion, all AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it’s boring, so he is starting something new. Roland Gavrilescu, a former xAI engineer, left in November to start Nuraline, a company building forward-deployed AI agents, but posted again that he left the firm to build something new with others that left xAI.
The departures come at a moment of significant controversy for xAI. The company is facing regulatory scrutiny after its AI, Grok, created nonconsensual explicit deepfakes of women and children which were disseminated on X. French authorities last week raided X offices as part of an investigation. The company is also moving towards a planned IPO later this year, after being legally acquired by SpaceX last week.
Musk is also facing personal controversy after files published by the Justice Department show extended conversations with convicted rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The emails show Musk discussing a visit to Epstein’s island on two separate occasions, in 2012 and 2013.
xAI maintains a headcount of over 1,000 employees, so the departures are unlikely to affect the company’s short-term capabilities. Still, 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. This is a sign of how quickly the narrative of a mass exodus has snowballed on Musk’s X platform.
Still, co-founder exits are harder to dismiss as routine churn. As Musk continues to consolidate his AI ambitions, their departures raise broader questions about governance and long-term stability at xAI. In frontier AI, where talent is scarce, qualities like reputational gravity and mission clarity matter. The more pressing question may not be how many engineers have left, but whether xAI can maintain the institutional steadiness needed to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.