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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 are organizing 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 o’clock, he went further, and explained this departure It was 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, incl Two founderspublicly announced their departure from xAI last week — although two of those exits appear to have occurred 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.
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Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, xAI co-founder and inference leader, He said in another He announced his resignation: “It’s time for my next chapter. This is an era full of possibilities: a small team armed with artificial intelligence that can move mountains and redefine what is possible.”
Shayan Salehian, who worked on product infrastructure and modeling behavior after training at xAI and previously worked at Twitter/X, He said last week He was leaving to “start something new.”
Waheed Kazemi, who spent a short period working on machine learning, Published Tuesday Which 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.”
Departure comes in an instant Big controversy For xAI. facing the company Regulatory audit After Grok created explicit, non-consensual deepfakes of women and children that were posted on X — Last week, French authorities raided Area X offices as part of the investigation. The company is also moving towards a Planned IPO 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. Musk’s emails appear 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 1000 employeesSo 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: Aayush Jaiswal“This was my last week at xAI. I’m taking a few months to spend time with family and play around with the AI,” the engineer wrote.
February 7: Shayan Salehianwho worked on product infrastructure and modeled behavior after training and was previously at He added that working closely with Elon Musk taught him “obsessive attention to detail, obsessive urgency, and thinking from first principles.”
February 9: Simon ChaiMTS (Technical Staff Member) wrote: “Today is my last day at xAI, and I feel very lucky with this opportunity. It has been an amazing journey.”
February 9: Yuhuai (Tony) WuThe co-founder and Head of Inference wrote: “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.”
February 10: Jimmy BaThe co-founder and head of research/safety wrote: “Last day in xAI. We are heading into an era of 100x productivity with the right tools. Iterative self-improvement loops will likely come into play 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.”
February 10: Wahid Al-KazemiHe, who has 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: Hang Gao“I left xAI today,” he, who has worked on multimedia efforts including Grok Imagine, wrote. 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: Roland Gavrilescuthe engineer who left in November to start Nuraline posted: “I’ve left xAI. I’m building something new with others who left xAI. We’re hiring :)”
February 10: Chase me“Do a quick reset, then get back to the limits,” wrote a member of Macrohard’s founding 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 Mawho has been working at xAI since X was called Twitter, worked on improvements to the app and recommendation model, including “X 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 (Radh) Venkataramaniwho worked on Grok’s logic and reinforcement learning systems, wrote: “The last eight months in 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 begins to accelerate itself, and from here the path only goes vertical.”
This article was originally published on February 11 and has been updated to include additional employee departures.
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