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

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

Less than a day later, on Tuesday afternoon, XAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who reports directly to Musk, said he was also swinging by, posting a sweet note to X on his way out. The message read in part: “Many thanks to @elonmusk for bringing us together on this amazing journey. Very proud of what the xAI team has done and will continue to stay close as a friend of the team.”

Both were in themselves a standard announcement of the technology’s departure, but they are part of a troubling pattern at the lab. Six members of the company’s 12-person founding team have now left, five of whom left in the past year alone. Infrastructure lead Kyle Kosic left for OpenAI in mid-2024, followed by Google veteran Christian Szegedy in February 2025. Last August, Igor Babushkin left to found a venture firm, and Greg Yang, a Microsoft alumnus, left just last month, citing health issues.

By all accounts, the splits were all amicable, and there are plenty of reasons why some founders might decide to move on, nearly three years later. Elon Musk is a very demanding president, and with SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI completed and an IPO pending in the coming months, everyone involved has very big gains coming. It’s a great time to fundraise for an AI startup, so it’s only natural that high-profile researchers will want to strike out on their own.

There are also less friendly reasons that may be taken into consideration. The company’s flagship product, the Grok chatbot, has been plagued by bizarre behavior and apparent internal manipulation — something that could easily lead to friction with the technical team. Then there were the recent changes to xAI’s image creation tools that have flooded the platform with fake porn, leading to slow-moving but real legal consequences.

Whatever the cause, the cumulative effect is worrying. There’s a lot of work left in xAI, and the IPO will bring more scrutiny than the lab has faced before. With Musk already preparing plans for orbital data centers, the pressure to implement those plans will be intense. The pace of model development is not slowing down, and if Grok can’t keep up with the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic, the IPO could easily suffer.

In short, the stakes are high, and XAI needs to retain all the AI ​​talent it can.