Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI is experiencing something of an exodus. The company has lost two cofounders and at least six other researchers in the last few weeks, according to public posts from employees.
Jimmy Ba, a cofounder who led research and safety efforts at the company, announced his departure on Tuesday via an X post that thanked Musk and said he would “continue to stay close as a friend of the team.” His exit followed hours after Monday’s departure of Tony Wu, another cofounder who had led the company’s reasoning team. Several other members of xAI’s technical staff, including Hang Gao, have also announced their departures in the last week.
The fresh exits mean that xAI’s founding team has now been cut in half, with six of the original 12 members now gone. Five of those exits occurred within the past year alone, including Kyle Kosic, who oversaw infrastructure before jumping to OpenAI in mid-2024, and Christian Szegedy, a former Google engineer who left last February. Igor Babuschkin also left in August last year to launch his own venture capital firm, while Greg Yang, who previously worked at Microsoft, departed last month for health-related reasons.
High turnover in the AI industry has not been unusual in recent months—with researchers often jumping ship to rival labs or leaving to start their own ventures—but the scale of the exits at xAI is unusual. Representatives for xAI did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment on the departures.
The exact reasons for the departures are unclear, but Musk has just merged the AI company with his rocket company, SpaceX, in a consolidation of his business empire. Musk has characterized the merger as part of his ambitious vision to launch a network of data-center satellites capable of running advanced AI models from space. But some more skeptical of the merger have pointed out that it also provides a solution for xAI’s massive capital requirements for chips, electricity, and infrastructure.
Musk reportedly intends to take the combined SpaceX-xAI entity public as early as June. But the wave of departures, especially if it continues, could complicate those plans and spook potential investors.
There have also reportedly been internal tensions at xAI over the pace of product development and technical demands amid intense competition. xAI’s MacroHard-coding and agents project is competing with established and popular tools like OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, while its AI chatbots—including its “companions”—are facing competition from ChatGPT and smaller companion-focused companies like Character.ai. xAI’s companions have failed to deliver the engagement expected, leaving Musk frustrated, according to a report in the Financial Times.
The start-up has also been weathering public controversies and global regulatory pressure over the last year. Late last year, xAI’s Grok chatbot came under scrutiny from governments worldwide after the X platform was flooded with images of AI-generated non-consensual sexual imagery, including allegations of sexualized images of children, created by the bot. After some initial delays, xAI says it has updated the chatbot to block the creation of non-consensual specialized imagery. It wasn’t the first time Grok had gone rogue on X. Last summer, the company was also forced to make changes to the chatbot after it began praising Hitler and making antisemitic posts across the social media platform.
Over the past year, xAI has seen departures among its C-suite as well, including its general counsel, chief financial officer, and head of product engineering. xAI was merged with social networking platform X, formerly Twitter, in March 2025. Linda Yaccarino, who served as X’s CEO, left in July and has not been replaced.
