On Monday evening, xAI co-founder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced that he would be leaving the company. “It’s time for my next chapter,” Wu wrote in a post late on X. “It’s an era of full potential: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”
Less than a day later, on Tuesday afternoon, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who reports directly to Musk, said he’s also jumping and posting a gracious message on X on his way out. “Huge thanks to @elonmusk for bringing us together on this incredible journey. So proud of what the xAI team has done and will continue to stay close as a friend of the team,” it read in part.
By themselves, both were pretty standard tech exit announcements — but they’re part of a troubling pattern for the lab. Six members of the company’s 12-strong founding team have now left the company, five of which have only taken place within the last year. Infrastructure manager Kyle Kosic left for OpenAI in mid-2024, followed by Google veteran Christian Szegedy in February 2025. In August 2025, Igor Babuschkin left to found a venture firm, and Microsoft alum Greg Yang left last month, citing health issues.
By all accounts, the splits have all been amicable, and there are many reasons why, nearly three years on, some founders might have decided to move on. Elon Musk is a notoriously demanding boss, and with SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI completed and a pending IPO in the coming months, everyone involved has a pretty big windfall coming. It’s a great time to be fundraising for an AI startup, so it’s only natural for high-level researchers to want to strike out on their own.
There are also less friendly reasons that can play a role. The company’s flagship product, the Grok chatbot, has struggled with bizarre behavior and apparent internal manipulation — the kind of thing that can easily cause friction on the tech team. Then there were the recent changes to xAI’s image generation tools that flooded the platform with deep-fake pornography, triggering slow but real legal consequences.
Whatever the cause, the cumulative effect is alarming. Much work remains on xAI, and an IPO will bring more scrutiny than the lab has ever faced before. With Musk already embarking on plans for orbital data centers, the pressure to make good on those plans will be intense. The pace of model development is not slowing down, and if Grok cannot keep up with the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic, the IPO could easily suffer.
In short, the stakes are high and xAI needs to hold on to all the AI ​​talent it can.
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