Elon Musk says xAI missed talented candidates — so he's reopening the résumé stack

• Elon Musk said he is revisiting old résumés submitted to xAI.
• A string of cofounders have left the startup since January.
• This week, Musk acknowledged the startup's setup issues and said the same happened with Tesla.

Elon Musk is combing old interviews as high-profile employees continue to exit his AI startup.

"Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI. My apologies," Musk said in a Friday morning post on X.

Musk added that he and Baris Akis, who works on the xAI talent engineering team, will be "going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates."

The hiring efforts come as xAI's exodus of cofounders continues. On Thursday, Business Insider reported that Zihang Dai left xAI earlier this week, and Guodong Zhang has told people he plans to leave in the coming days.

The two departures follow the recent exits of a string of xAI cofounders, including Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang, all of whom have left since January.

Musk launched xAI, the maker of Grok, in 2023 alongside 11 other cofounders to compete with rival frontier labs like OpenAI and Google. After Dai and Zhang's departures, only two of the 11 people who started the company with Musk in 2023 — Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen — will remain.

Musk announced last month that he reorganized xAI and parted ways with some staffers. Some of the cuts have impacted workers on the company's AI white collar project, Macrohard, and Grok Imagine, its AI image and video generator, Business Insider previously reported.

Amid the cofounders' departures, Musk has also acknowledged the startup's shortfalls.

"xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up," Musk wrote on X on Thursday. "Same thing happened with Tesla."

On Wednesday, Musk said at the Abundance Summit that "Grok is currently behind in coding."

"The reason I was late for this was that I was just in a giant sort of all-hands on coding, going through all the things that need to happen to essentially exceed our competitors on coding, which I think we'll do," he said.

In early February, Musk announced that his space company SpaceX would acquire xAI. XAI purchased the social media platform X in March 2025.