Well, now exactly half of the xAI founding team has left the company

On Monday night, xAI co-founder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced that he was leaving the company. “It’s time for my next chapter,” wrote Wu in the night post at X. “It’s time for full potential: a small team of AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”

Less than a day later, on Tuesday afternoon, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who directly reported to Musk, said he was also jumping, sending a kind note on X on his way out. “We are so grateful to @elonmusk for bringing us together on this incredible journey. Proud of what the xAI team has done and will continue to be a partner of the team,” he said. read a little.

On their own, they were all announcements of high-tech trends — but that’s part of the lab’s challenge. Six members of the a company founding team of 12 people they have now left the company, and five of the departures have come in the past year. Chief architect Kyle Kosic left OpenAI in mid-2024, followed by Google veteran Christian Szegedy in February 2025. Last August, Igor Babuschkin. left to find a business companyand Microsoft alum Greg Yang left last month, mentioning health issues.

In general, the split has been mutual, and there are many reasons why, in about three years, some founders may decide to move on. Elon Musk is a very tough boss, and with SpaceX acquiring a full-fledged xAI and an expected IPO in the coming months, everyone involved is in for a big headwind. It’s a great time to fund AI startups, so it’s only natural that top researchers want to do it themselves.

There are also subtle reasons that can cause it. The company’s product, the Grok chatbot, has struggled. strange behavior and internal disturbance – the kind of stuff that can easily cause controversy in the tech community. Then there were the recent updates to the xAI image processing tools themselves flooded the platform with fake pornslow but real lighting legal consequences.

Whatever the cause, the rate is alarming. There’s still a lot of work to be done on xAI, and the IPO will bring more scrutiny than the lab has ever faced before. It’s already Musk planning for an orbital data centerthe pressure to succeed in those plans will be intense. The model speed is not slowing down, and if Grok can’t keep up with the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models, the IPO could easily suffer.

In short, the stakes are high, and xAI needs to hold on to all the AI ​​talent it can.