xAI co-founders are leaving, what’s going on?

xAI is facing significant leadership changes as co-founders are leaving the company amid operational shifts. Some of the key exits are Igor Babuschkin, who left in August 2025, followed by Greg Yang in January 2026, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu in February 2026, and Jimmy Ba, who public his outgoing today. These exits represent nearly half of the original founding team, which formed xAI in 2023 to advance AI for scientific discovery.

Other key team members also departed during this period. In 2025, Rob Keele exited as Lead Legal in August, David Rossi as AI Compute Lead in August, Qian Huang as Member of Technical Staff in August, Lily Lim as Head Legal in November, Norman Mu as Safety Lead in December, and Ying Sheng as Member of Technical Staff in December.

In 2026, Yifei Zhou left as a Member of Technical Staff in January, Sulaiman Khan Ghori as an Engineer in January, and Ari Sawyers as a team member in January. These departures span technical, legal, and operational roles.

Elon Musk, xAI founder announcing Grok 3 along with other officials

xAI is founded to understand the universe through AI. The company launched the Memphis supercluster in 2025 and expanded Grok model capabilities. Departures occurred during rapid growth and intense AI competition.

SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2, 2026, integrating operations to share resources and accelerate progress. This merger combines SpaceX’s stable revenues, including from Starlink, with xAI’s AI expertise to cover high computational costs.

Speculations on X circulate about the reasons behind these exits and the merger. Users suggest clashes with leadership advisers over management and financial health prompted departures. Others point to frustrations with delays in new Grok models and shifts in corporate culture following the acquisition.

Discussions highlight xAI’s capital burn and limited revenue as factors necessitating the merger, viewing it as a bailout or exit strategy for investors. Some describe the deal as unfavorable for SpaceX shareholders, emphasizing xAI’s dependency on SpaceX’s infrastructure.

However, the company or its founder, Elon Musk, said nothing about the departures. On the other hand, none of these outgoing co-founders has revealed the reason behind their exit.

xAI raised $20 billion in Series E funding on January 6, 2026, bolstering its position before the acquisition. The company announced the Grok Imagine API for video generation on January 28, 2026, enhancing multimodal processing.

Grok 4 demonstrates improvements in reasoning, with ongoing work on agent tools and real-time information retrieval. These advancements position xAI for breakthroughs in recursive self-improvement and productivity applications despite the transitions