All 11 xAI co-founders depart Elon Musk’s company
▼ Summary
– All eleven co-founders of xAI, including the last two Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, have now left the company.
– The departed co-founders were highly accomplished AI researchers from top firms like Google DeepMind and OpenAI, representing a major talent loss.
– The exodus accelerated in early 2026, closely following SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI in a historic $250 billion deal.
– Elon Musk publicly stated xAI’s products were not competitive and needed a foundational rebuild, validating the co-founders’ departures.
– This follows a pattern of leadership attrition at Musk’s companies, highlighting organizational challenges in research-driven fields where top talent has many alternatives.
The complete departure of all eleven co-founders from Elon Musk’s xAI marks a seismic shift for a company valued at $250 billion. This is not typical startup turnover. The team assembled in 2023 comprised some of the most distinguished minds in the field, including Jimmy Ba, author of the seminal Adam optimisation paper, and engineers from Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Their collective exit, finalized this week with the departures of Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, leaves the company without the founding research talent that built its core technology.
This mass exodus accelerated rapidly in early 2026. After an early departure in 2025, the cascade began in earnest when operational lead Tony Wu left on February 10. Jimmy Ba resigned the next day, reportedly amid pressure to deliver better model performance. By mid-March, the final two co-founders had departed, clearing the entire original bench. This timeline coincides with profound corporate changes. In February, SpaceX acquired xAI in a historic merger, placing it under a single corporate umbrella with X and the rocket company. Just weeks prior, Tesla invested $2 billion into xAI, a move now facing a shareholder lawsuit alleging breach of fiduciary duty.
The context for the departures became starkly clear on March 13. Musk publicly stated that xAI’s AI coding tools were not competitive and that the underlying system needed to be rebuilt from the foundations up. For researchers who built that system, such a candid admission from leadership likely validated their decision to seek opportunities elsewhere. The current AI talent market is fiercely competitive, with companies like Meta offering compensation packages worth hundreds of millions to secure top minds. This cohort of eleven represents a prize catch for any major lab.
While xAI retains significant assets, including the massive Colossus supercomputer and distribution via X, the loss of its entire founding research brain trust poses a fundamental challenge. Infrastructure and capital, now amplified by the SpaceX merger, may not compensate for the absence of the people who defined the company’s technical vision. This event follows a recognizable pattern across Musk’s ventures, where a management style yielding extraordinary results in hardware engineering meets different dynamics in research-driven fields. In artificial intelligence research, top talent possesses abundant alternatives and little patience for instability. The unanimous choice by every co-founder to leave, even after a record valuation and merger, suggests the core issues are organizational, a problem that capital alone cannot solve once a research culture has dissipated.
(Source: The Next Web)
