All 11 co-founders of xAI have departed from Elon Musk's AI company.

      Every co-founder that Elon Musk brought on to establish xAI has reportedly left the company. This month, Manuel Kroiss, who led the pretraining team, informed colleagues of his departure. Ross Nordeen, characterized by Business Insider as Musk's "right-hand operator," departed on Friday. They were the final two of the eleven co-founders, with all having exited a firm that was appraised at $250 billion when SpaceX acquired it in February. Just two weeks prior, Musk himself mentioned that the organization had been “not built right the first time around.”

      These departures go beyond typical startup turnover. The researchers Musk gathered in 2023 were among the most skilled in artificial intelligence. Jimmy Ba co-authored the 2014 Adam optimization paper, the most-cited paper in AI, boasting over 95,000 citations. Igor Babuschkin, the chief engineer, came from Google DeepMind, and Christian Szegedy joined from Google. Tony Wu led the reasoning team, while Greg Yang, Toby Pohlen, Zihang Dai, Guodong Zhang, and Kyle Kosic brought experience from DeepMind, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. This entire group has now departed, and the company they contributed to is being, as Musk stated, “rebuilt from the foundations up.”

      A timeline of events shows a rapid unraveling. The exodus accelerated sharply in early 2026. Christian Szegedy's departure in February 2025 was an early indication. However, the significant departures began when Tony Wu, one of the key operational co-founders, announced he was leaving on February 10, 2026. Jimmy Ba resigned within 24 hours, allegedly due to tensions about improving model performance. By mid-March, only Kroiss and Nordeen remained, and their departures this week completed the exodus.

      The timing of these exits is closely linked to the corporate restructuring around xAI. On February 2, SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock deal that valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion, creating a combined worth of $1.25 trillion, marking the largest corporate merger by valuation in history. This agreement brought xAI, X (formerly Twitter), and SpaceX under a single corporate umbrella, with SpaceX now gearing up for a potential IPO in mid-2026, targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation.

      In January, prior to this, Tesla made a $2 billion investment in xAI’s Series E funding round, which was valued at around $230 billion. Tesla shareholders are suing Musk for breach of fiduciary duty over this investment, arguing that the CEO redirected shareholder funds into his own private project. This lawsuit gained additional traction on March 13, when Musk publicly acknowledged that xAI’s products, especially its coding tools, were not competitive with those of Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex. Tesla had invested $2 billion into a company whose founder admitted it required a complete overhaul.

      Musk’s candid admission on March 13 was unusual for a CEO whose company had recently been acquired for a quarter of a trillion dollars. He stated that xAI’s AI coding tools simply failed to perform and that the systems needed to be entirely reconstructed. This comment seemed to validate the co-founders’ choice to leave: if the leadership acknowledges the product’s shortcomings, the researchers who created it have little reason to stay for the reconstruction, especially as they can command impressive compensation at rival firms.

      In 2026, the AI talent market is more competitive than ever. Reports suggest that Meta has offered packages worth up to $300 million over four years to attract top AI researchers. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic are aggressively expanding their research teams. The eleven researchers who left xAI represent a talent pool that any of these companies would pay generously to include. Their new positions will likely indicate the industry's future direction, just as their departures highlight xAI's issues.

      xAI possesses valuable assets. The Colossus supercomputer, outfitted with more than 200,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, is among the largest AI training clusters globally. Grok, the firm’s chatbot, has a distribution channel through X’s user base. Additionally, the SpaceX merger offers access to capital, infrastructure, and engineering talent at a level that few AI companies can rival. The critical question is whether infrastructure and distribution can compensate for the absence of the research leadership that was meant to make the product competitive.

      This pattern of exodus mirrors trends seen in Musk’s other companies. Twitter saw most of its senior leadership and about 80 percent of its workforce depart just months after his 2022 acquisition. Tesla's senior ranks have diminished steadily as Musk's focus has spread across six companies. A common thread is a management approach that yields extraordinary results in hardware engineering—where Musk’s willingness to take risks and rapid iteration have made SpaceX and Tesla industry leaders—but seems less