Half of xAI cofounders exit as Musk prepares for public offering

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence venture, xAI, is facing a striking wave of departures among its founding team. In the past week, co-founders Jimmy Ba and Yuhuai Tony Wu announced they were leaving the company.

Their exits bring the total number of departed founders to six out of 12, signalling a major shake-up less than three years after the company was established.

Ba, who reported directly to Musk, thanked his colleagues and Musk for the opportunity to help build xAI. Wu expressed excitement about pursuing new opportunities, emphasising the potential of small teams empowered by AI to achieve significant results.

These announcements follow a pattern of departures over the past year, including Kyle Kosic, Christian Szegedy, Igor Babuschkin, and Greg Yang, the latter stepping back due to health concerns.

While many exits are described as amicable, the timing is noteworthy. xAI recently became part of SpaceX and is preparing for a high-profile initial public offering later this year.

Such transitions often bring restructuring and heightened pressure, which Musk has acknowledged. The company has been reorganised into four main areas: Grok chatbots, coding tools, a text-to-video platform called Imagine, and an AI agent project, Macrohard (yes, this is a shade towards Microsoft).

Top execs quitting is not the only challenge Musk is facing — the Grok chatbot has faced bans in several countries, linked to the circulation of harmful material, and the company is under criminal investigation.

At the same time, it competes with other powerful AI models that do not carry such controversies.

However, despite strong criticisms, Musk remains optimistic, announcing aggressive hiring plans and ambitious initiatives, including orbital data centres.