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Elon Musk's AI company has now lost half of its founding members.
This week alone, xAI co-founders Jimmy Ba and Yuahai (Tony) Wu both announced their departure from the company, as TechCrunch reports. This follows other co-founders leaving over the past year, bringing the original 12 down to just six.
“It’s time for my next chapter,” Wu tweeted. “It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”
Ba followed suit a day later. He thanked Musk for his time at xAI, but said it was "time to recalibrate my gradient on the big picture."
In mid-2024, infrastructure lead Kyle Kosic left for OpenAI, where he serves as a member of technical staff. Christian Szegedy, mathematician and xAI researcher, left in February 2025 to work on superintelligence research. In August, Igor Babushkin left xAI to found a new venture capital firm. And Greg Yang moved into an advisory role in January to focus on his health after contracting Lyme disease.
(Credit: Kristian Buus via Getty Images)Individually, any of these departures wouldn't be a surprise for a relatively new startup working on cutting-edge technologies. But collectively, they are uncommon. As TechCrunch notes, though, Musk is a notoriously difficult boss, and the pace of AI development and competition has been extreme. In his goodbye tweet, Yang said he "pushed myself hard building xAI and weakened my immune system."
This afternoon, xAI posted the company's recent town hall, where Musk stressed that xAI is only 2.5 years old ("basically a toddler"); you can watch the whole thing in the tweet below.
But Musk added in his own tweet that, "As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve just like any living organism. This unfortunately required parting ways with some people. We wish them well in future endeavors. We are hiring aggressively. Join xAI if the idea of mass drivers on the Moon appeals to you."
This all comes as xAI has come under fire for allowing its Grok chatbot to produce sexualized images of women and girls without their knowledge. And who could forget last year's "mechahitler" fiasco?
However, there may be a more obvious reason for the departures: SpaceX's upcoming IPO. Musk's space company acquired xAI ahead of an initial public offering, meaning these founders will soon have even more money in their pockets to shop around to investors.
Other tech giants are not immune to high-profile departures. Meta reportedly spent millions to poach OpenAI execs, while several OpenAI leaders have left to start their own companies.