xAI
xAI Founder Elon Musk addresses departure of co-founders
xAI Founder and CEO, Elon Musk, expressed gratitude to departing co-founders and team members during xAI’s recent all-hands meeting, highlighting their role in the company’s early success while addressing ongoing restructuring.
“Because we’ve reached a certain scale, we’re organizing the company to be more effective at this scale. Naturally, when this happens, there’s some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company, less suited for the later stages. For the people that have departed, I’d just like to say thank you for your contribution. Thank you for getting us this far, and we wish you very well in your future endeavors,” said Musk.
xAI, founded in 2023, has expanded rapidly to over 1,000 employees. The restructuring aims to enhance execution speed and adapt to growth, evolving the organizational structure like a living organism. It includes forming four key areas: Grok for chatbot and voice features, Coding for development tools, Imagine for video generation, and Macrohard for AI agents capable of managing companies.
Founder and CEO, Elon Musk, addressing the xAI All-Hands meeting
Among those leaving are six of the original 12 co-founders: Jimmy Ba, who led research and safety; Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, head of reasoning; Greg Yang; Igor Babuschkin, who built Grok models; Christian Szegedy; and Kyle Kosic. Other notable exits include Lily Lim, former head of legal, and Eric Zelikman, a key engineer.
As of February 2026, xAI continues to hire to pursue ambitious goals, such as real-time video understanding, autonomous agents, and lunar mass drivers, amid hints of deeper integration with SpaceX.
Recent departures of Ba and Wu on February 10-11 underscore the shift and raised some questions, but Musk emphasizes the importance of aligning with high-impact talent to accelerate frontier AI progress.
