Elon Musk points out that the wave of XAI exits was a push, not a pull

Elon Musk is dealing with a wave of departures from xAI, including two more co-founders who departed this week, bringing the total to six out of 12.

In an all-hands meeting Tuesday night, Musk suggested the exits were about fitness, not performance. “Because we have reached a certain scale, we organize the company to be more effective at that scale,” he said, according to the New York Times. “In fact, when this happens, there are some people who are better suited for the early stages of the company and less suited for the later stages.”

On Wednesday afternoon at X, he went further, clarifying that these departures were not voluntary. “xAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve execution speed,” Musk wrote. “As a company grows, especially at the speed of xAI, the structure has to evolve just like any living organism. This has unfortunately required ways to disconnect for some people.”

He added that the company is “hiring aggressively” and concluded his speech with a core idea for Musk: “Join xAI if you like the idea of ​​crowdsourced drivers on the moon.”

Losing half of the founding partners in a relatively short period raises questions, and Musk’s comments seem designed to control the narrative, recasting exits as necessary rather than being a problem for the organization.

In total, at least 11 engineers, including the two co-founders, publicly announced their departure from xAI in the past week — although two of those engineers appear to have happened a few weeks ago.

Three of the departing employees said they would start something new alongside other former xAI engineers, though details about the new project were not available. Others hinted at a desire for more autonomy and smaller teams to build leading-edge technology more quickly, citing an expected increase in AI productivity.

“It’s time for my next chapter,” Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, xAI’s co-founder and head of inference, said in a post announcing his resignation: “It’s time for my next chapter. It’s an era filled with full potential: a small team armed with AI can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”

Shayan Salehian, who worked in product infrastructure and model behavior after training at xAI and previously worked at Twitter/X, said last week that he was leaving to “start something new.”

Wahid Kazemi, who had a brief stint working on machine learning, announced on Tuesday that he left a few weeks ago, adding: “IMO, all the AI ​​labs are building exactly the same thing, and it’s boring… So, I’m starting something new.”

Former XAI engineer Roland Gavrilesco left in November to start Nuraline, a company building “the pervasive AI agents of the future,” but he posted again on Tuesday that he was leaving the company to build “something new with others who left XAI.”

The departures come at a moment of great controversy for xAI. The company is facing regulatory scrutiny after Grok created fake, non-consensual explicit images of women and children that were posted on X – French authorities last week raided X’s offices as part of the investigation. The company is also headed toward a planned initial public offering later this year, after it was legally acquired by SpaceX last week.

Musk is also facing personal controversy after files released by the Justice Department showed lengthy conversations with convicted rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The emails show Musk discussing a visit to Epstein’s island on two separate occasions, in 2012 and 2013. Epstein was first convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008.

xAI maintains a headcount of more than 1,000 employees, so the departures are unlikely to impact the company’s capabilities in the short term. However, the rapid pace of recent departures has taken on a character of its own online, with users jokingly declaring on

However, forced exit of founders is rarely a sign of smooth expansion. While Musk frames the reorganization as calculated, the fact that several engineers followed the co-founders out the door — and that at least three started something new together — suggests that the departures may also reflect deeper tensions. In the frontier field of AI, where talent is scarce and reputation matters, the ability of intelligent AI to attract and retain top researchers will be tested as it competes with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

TechCrunch has reached out to xAI for more information.

Timeline for departure announcements

The following employees publicly announced their departure from xAI on X in recent days:

February 6: “This was my last week at xAI. I’m taking a few months to spend time with family and play around with the AI,” engineer Aayush Jaiswal wrote.

February 7: “I left xAI to start something new, and I’m ending my 7+ year career at Twitter, He added that working closely with Elon Musk taught him “obsessive attention to detail, obsessive urgency, and thinking from first principles.”

February 9: Simon Zhai, MTS (Technical Staff Member) wrote: “Today is my last day at xAI, and I feel very fortunate for this opportunity. It has been an amazing journey.”

February 9: “I resigned from xAI today. It’s time for my next chapter. It’s an era filled with full potential: a small team armed with AI can move mountains and redefine what’s possible,” wrote Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Co-Founder and Head of Inference.

February 10: “Last day of xAI. We are heading into an era of 100x productivity with the right tools. Iterative self-improvement loops will likely begin in the next 12 months. It’s time to recalibrate my progression on the big picture. 2026 is going to be crazy and likely the busiest (and most important) year for the future of our species,” wrote Jamie Ba, co-founder and head of research/safety.

February 10: Vahid Kazemi, a PhD in machine learning, wrote that he left xAI “a few weeks ago,” adding: “IMO, all AI labs are building exactly the same thing, and it’s boring. I think there’s room for more creativity. So, I’m starting something new.”

February 10: “I left xAI today,” wrote Hang Zhao, who has worked on cross-media efforts, including Grok Imagine. He described his time there as “truly rewarding”, citing contributions to Grok Imagine’s releases and praising the team’s “humble craftsmanship and ambitious vision”.

February 10: “I’ve left xAI. I’m building something new with others who left xAI. We’re hiring :),” posted Roland Gavrilesco, an engineer who left in November to start Nuraline.

February 10: “Do a quick reset, then get back to the limits,” wrote Chase Lee, a member of the founding Macrohard team. (MacroHard is an AI-only software project within XAI, designed to fully automate software development, coding, and operations using Grok-powered multi-agent systems. Its name is a dig at Microsoft.)

February 11: Andrew Ma, who has been working at xAI since X was called Twitter, worked on improvements to the app’s model and recommendations, including “X’s video feed, search bar, user modeling, starter packs, and home feed model.” He wrote: “I’m excited for the future – I’m not sure what I’ll do yet (my DMs are open), but there’s a world to change and there’s no time to waste. Team up, stay focused, and stay active. I can’t wait to see you all on the moon and beyond. Believe me when I say there’s no one I trust more on the entire planet to get there. There’s a world to be won.”

February 12: Radhakrishnan (Rad) Venkataramani, who worked on Grok’s inference and reinforcement learning systems, wrote: “The last eight months on the RL Systems/SWE-RL team pushing our programming model to be SOTA and toward iterative self-improvement will always be the most memorable of my life… We are at an inflection point where intelligence starts to accelerate itself, and from here the path only gets vertical.”

This article was originally published on February 11 and has been updated to include additional employee departures.

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