Xai’s legal boss steps down after whirlwind years

Robert Keele said this week that he is deducted as Xai’s leader of legally for just over a year and said he will spend more time with his children. In his message, Keele also recognized “Daylight between our worldview” with chief Elon Musk, who has not commented on Keel’s exit.

“I love my two toddlers and I don’t get to see them enough,” Keele wrote and put the news on both X and LinkedIn. Despite calling his time on the AI starting “incredible” and working with musk “The Adventure of Life,” he said he couldn’t keep “Riding two horses at once – the family and the job.”

Keel’s news received an outflow of support on social media from Xai colleagues as well as parents. When he joined Xai in May 2024 as its first legal head, he had just launched his own, very short -lived legitimate legal clothing. “Keel Law had a good race (~ 3 weeks!), But I couldn’t give an opportunity to drive legally on Xai,” he wrote at the time, calling himself “beyond the stok and insanely lucky.”

Keele arrived just before XAI announced a massive $ 6 billion B -Billion Billion Funding Round in May 2024, supported by heavy mothers such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, which rated the company for $ 24 billion. Shortly afterwards, Xai began experiencing rapid growth and acquired in March this year X, Musk’s Social Media Company, in an agreement that, Musk at that time, appreciated Xai to $ 80 billion and X to $ 33 billion.

Prior to his entrepreneurial, Keele had been the leader of legal with autonomous aircraft manufacturer Elroy Air and General Counsel at Airbus’ Silicon Valley Innovation Center.

Taking over is Lily Lim, who, before he became a lawyer, was a rocket scientist at NASA, and worked with spacecraft navigation for the project that mapped Venus’s surface. She joined Xai at the end of 2024 as privacy and IP specialist after legal stints at several companies and companies such as ServiceNow.

Keel’s departure fits an ongoing pattern of executive turnover across Musk’s empire. X CEO Linda Yaccarino left last month and Tesla has lost several top executives recently. Musk – who also has several long -standing lieutenants – openly expects employees to work long hours, even if it means sleeping in the office, as it happened when he acquired X, formerly Twitter.

Some recent companies appear to have adopted a similar mentality to get ahead of rivals, including AI coding start -cognition, which seems to aggressively shrink its team. In fact, its CEO recently told staff in an email that he does not believe in work-life balance.