A wave of departures is hitting Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, with two co-founders and at least eight other employees announcing their resignations in recent days. The exits come as Musk announced a restructuring of the company and a planned merger with his rocket company, SpaceX.
Tony Wu, an xAI co-founder and former Google researcher, announced his departure on February 9, stating on X, the social media platform owned by Musk, that it was time for his “next chapter” and thanking Musk for “the ride of a lifetime.” Jimmy Ba, another co-founder overseeing AI tutoring efforts, followed suit less than 48 hours later, also expressing gratitude to Musk in a post on X.
With Ba’s departure, six of the eleven co-founders who launched xAI with Musk in 2023 have now left the company, according to reports. Other recent departures include Hang Gao, a member of technical staff who worked on xAI’s Grok Imagine AI video generator; Vahid Kazemi, who left after a few weeks, stating he found all AI labs were building the “exact same thing”; and Ayush Jaiswal, who worked on Grok and left to spend time with family.
Shayan Salehian, who worked on the X timeline and Grok models, also announced his departure, stating he was leaving after a seven-year stint at X and xAI to focus on accelerating science. Simon Zhai, a member of the technical staff, and Andrew Ma, who worked on X’s recommendation system, also announced their resignations. Radhakrishnan Venkataramani, who worked on reasoning and reinforcement learning systems for Grok, and Rahul Ravishankar, a Berkeley graduate, also departed this week.
Musk addressed the departures in a post on X, stating that xAI had been reorganized “to improve speed of execution.” He added that the company was “still hiring aggressively.” The restructuring coincides with a plan to merge xAI with SpaceX, a move Musk believes will aid build a network of AI data centers in Earth’s orbit. He outlined a vision for a “self-sustaining” city and a catapult, or mass driver, on the moon to launch AI data center satellites into space.
The developments at xAI occur as SpaceX prepares for a potential public offering later this year, which could value the company at as much as $1.5 trillion. This could provide a significant financial boost to xAI, which reportedly spent billions of dollars last year.
xAI has faced scrutiny since its founding in 2023, including backlash over sexually explicit images of real people generated on X by Grok, its AI chatbot.
