Six xAI Co-Founders Exit Amid Grok Controversy, SpaceX Merger

Half of the founding team at xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, has left less than three years after its founding.

The departure announcements by co-founders Yuhuai (Tony) Wu and Jimmy Ba this week bring the total number of exits to six, five of which have occurred in the past 12 months.

In both announcements, the co-founders spoke positively about their time at xAI, with Ba thanking Musk in his post: “Enormous thanks to @elonmusk for bringing us together on this incredible journey. So proud of what the xAI team has done and will continue to stay close as a friend of the team.” It is not yet clear whether Wu or Ba were poached by a rival or what their next roles will be.

Elon Musk recently merged xAI with his aerospace company SpaceX, creating a $1.25 trillion tech giant, so we can expect more founders looking to cash in on their highly valued stock options soon.

Musk responds to the departures

Musk has publicly addressed the wave of co-founder and staff exits at xAI as part of a broader reorganization following the company’s integration with SpaceX.

In a company-wide all-hands and posts on X, Musk described the restructuring as necessary “to improve speed of execution” at xAI’s expanding scale and said that the changes “unfortunately required parting ways with some people,” without specifying whether those departures were voluntary or involuntary.

He also framed the turnover as part of evolving organizational needs as the merged entity prepares for rapid growth and ambitious projects, adding that xAI is “hiring aggressively” to bring in new talent as it shifts into its next phase.

Controversy surrounds Grok

While none of the six departing founders have indicated any hostility, xAI has faced mounting legal and reputational challenges over the past six months. The company’s chatbot, Grok, has attracted negative headlines, most recently over its generative image model, which produced thousands of pornographic deepfakes.

Government officials in the US, the UK, the EU, and several Asian countries have either called for stricter action against Grok or urged a temporary ban on the AI service until its safety and ethical safeguards are improved.

Despite scrutiny, xAI has launched a new video generation model, Grok Imagine. Given that OpenAI introduced additional guardrails and moderation tools following the release of Sora, there is already speculation that similar controversies could emerge around the new service.

Grok has also been criticized for producing antisemitic outputs. At times, Musk has publicly intervened to make the chatbot “less woke,” a move that briefly led it to support extreme positions before it was recalibrated.

Poaching by rivals

Among the remaining co-founders, Kyle Kosic was recruited by OpenAI, and Christian Szegedy has also left the company. Musk has an ongoing rivalry with the company he helped co-found, including a lawsuit over OpenAI’s shift toward a for-profit structure and another case involving OpenAI and Apple related to Grok’s ranking on the App Store.

OpenAI experienced its own leadership turmoil, following a failed attempt by several executives to remove Sam Altman and return the company to a non-profit research model. Ilya Sutskever, Mira Murati, and Jan Leike left shortly after Altman was reinstated.

While the tenure of senior executives at major AI companies can be relatively short, hiring and retention trends often serve as a barometer of stability. Meta attracted top-tier AI talent last year with multimillion-dollar compensation packages, but several of those hires left within months.

Also read: Davos 2026 AI anxiety reflects how layoffs and lawsuits are shaping public trust in the AI boom.

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