Elon Musk is dealing with a wave of departures from xAI, including two more co-founders leaving the company this week, bringing the total to six out of the original 12.
At Tuesday night’s all-hands meeting, Musk suggested the exit was about fit, not performance. “Now that we’ve reached a certain size, we’re going to organize the company more efficiently at this size,” he said, according to the New York Times. “In fact, when that happens, some people are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for later stages.”
On Wednesday afternoon’s X, he went further and clarified that these departures were not voluntary. “xAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve execution speed,” Musk wrote. “As companies grow, especially as they grow as quickly as xAI, their structures need to evolve like any other living thing. Unfortunately, this has required us to part ways with some people.”
He added that the company is “aggressively hiring” and concluded with a typical Musk pitch: “If the idea of mass drivers on the moon appeals to you, join xAI.”
Losing half of the co-founders in a relatively short period of time raises questions, but Musk’s comments appear intended to reframe the exit and control the narrative as needed rather than an organizational issue.
In total, at least 11 engineers, including two co-founders, have publicly announced their departure from xAI over the past week. However, two of them appear to have left the company a few weeks ago.
Three of the departing staff members say they will start something new with other former xAI engineers, but details about the new venture have not been disclosed. Others point to expected productivity gains in AI and suggest they want more autonomy and smaller teams to build cutting-edge technology faster.
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Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, co-founder and head of inference at xAI, said in a post announcing his resignation: “It’s time to move on to the next chapter. A time of possibilities. A small team armed with AI can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”
Shayan Salehian, who works on post-training product infrastructure and model behavior at xAI and previously worked at Twitter/X, said last week he was leaving to “start something new.”
Vahid Kazemi, who worked on machine learning for a short time, posted on Tuesday that he was leaving a few weeks ago, adding, “IMO, all the AI labs are building the exact same thing and it’s boring… so I’m starting something new.”
Former xAI engineer Roland Gavrilescu, who left in November to start Nuraline, a company that builds “forward-deployed AI agents,” posted again on Tuesday that he was leaving to build “something new with another company that left xAI.”
The departure comes at a moment of significant controversy for xAI. Grok is facing regulatory scrutiny after it created explicit deepfakes of non-consensual women and children that were distributed on X. French authorities raided X’s offices last week as part of the investigation. The company is also moving toward an IPO scheduled for later this year after being legally acquired by SpaceX last week.
Musk has also faced personal controversy, with files released by the Justice Department recording lengthy conversations with convicted rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The emails show Musk discussing two separate visits to Epstein’s island in 2012 and 2013. Epstein was first convicted in 2008 for recruiting children for prostitution.
xAI maintains a workforce of over 1,000 people, so the departures are unlikely to impact the company’s near-term capabilities. Still, the recent pace of departures has taken on a life of its own online, with users jokingly announcing on X that they too were “quitting xAI” despite having never worked at xAI. This shows how quickly the “mass exodus” story snowballed on Musk’s social networks.
Still, the forced departure of a co-founder is rarely a sign of smooth scaling. While Musk paints the reorganization as calculated, the fact that several engineers have followed their co-founders out, and that at least three are starting something new together, suggests that the departures may reflect deeper tensions. At Frontier AI, where talent is scarce and reputation matters, xAI’s ability 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.
Departure announcement timeline
The following employees have publicly announced their departure from xAI on X in recent days.
February 6th: Engineer Ayush Jaiswal writes, “This was my last week at xAI. I’ll be spending a few months with my family and tinkering with the AI.”
February 7th: Shayan Salehian, who works on post-training product infrastructure and model behavior and was previously at X, writes: “I left xAI to start something new, and I closed out my seven-plus years at Twitter, X, and xAI with tremendous gratitude.” He added that working closely with Elon Musk taught him “obsessive attention to detail, insane urgency, and thinking from first principles.”
February 9: Simon Zhai, MTS (Member of Technical Staff) wrote, “Today is my last day at xAI. I feel very lucky to have this opportunity. It’s been an amazing journey.”
February 9: Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, co-founder and head of inference, writes: “Today, I’m leaving xAI. It’s time to move on to the next chapter. This is a time of possibility. Small teams armed with AI can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”
February 10: Co-founder and Head of Research/Safety Jimmy Ba writes: “Last day at xAI. We are heading into an era of 100x productivity with the right tools. Recursive self-improvement loops could be up and running within the next 12 months. It’s time to recalibrate the slope of the big picture. 2026 is insane and perhaps the busiest for our future. (and most important) of the year.”
February 10: Vahid Kazemi, ML PhD, writes that he left xAI “a few weeks ago,” adding, “IMO, all the AI labs are building the exact same thing and it’s boring. I think there’s room for more creativity. So I’m starting something new.”
February 10th: Hang Gao, who worked on multimodal initiatives including Grok Imagine, wrote, “I quit xAI today.” He called his time there “really rewarding,” citing his contributions to the release of Grok Imagine and praising the team’s “humble craftsmanship and ambitious vision.”
February 10th: Roland Gavrilescu, an engineer who left in November to start Nuraline, posted: “I left xAI. I’m building something new with others who left xAI. We’re hiring :).”
February 10th: Chase Lee, a member of Macrohard’s founding team, writes, “We’re going to reset a bit and then head back to the frontier.” (Macrohard is an AI-only software venture under xAI that is designed to fully automate software development, coding, and operations using a multi-agent system powered by Grok. Its name is Microsoft.)
February 11: Andrew Marr, who has been with xAI since X was called Twitter, worked on improvements to the app and recommendation model, including “the X video feed, search bar, user modeling, starter pack, and home feed model.” “I’m excited about the future. I don’t know what I’ll do yet (DMs are public), but the world has to change and there’s no time to waste. To my team, stay focused and stay strong. I can’t wait to see you all on the moon and beyond. Trust me when I say there’s no one on earth I trust more to get there. We have a world to win.”
February 12: Radhakrishnan (Rad) Venkataramani, who worked on Grok’s inference and reinforcement learning system, writes: “The past eight months of working with the RL Systems/SWE-RL team to SOTA our coding model and pushing toward recursive self-improvement will always be the most memorable of my life. We are at an inflection point where intelligence begins to accelerate. From here, the trajectory can only go vertically.”
This article was originally published on February 11 and has been updated to include additional employee departures.
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