Elon Musk is facing a wave of departures from xAI, including two more co-founders who left this week, bringing the total to six of the original 12.
In an all-hands meeting Tuesday night, Musk suggested the exits were about fitness, not performance. “Because we’ve reached a certain scale, we organize the company to be more efficient at that scale,” he said, according to the New York Times. “And actually, when that happens, there are some people who are better suited to the early stages of a company and less suited to the later stages.”
Wednesday afternoon at X, he went further, making those departures clear it was not voluntary. “xAI was refactored a few days ago to improve execution speed,” Musk wrote. “As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve like any living organism. This unfortunately required parting ways with some people.”
He added that the company is “hiring aggressively” and closed with a note to Musk: “Join xAI if the idea of mass drivers on the Moon appeals to you.”
Losing half of your co-founders in a relatively short period of time raises questions, and Musk’s comments seem designed to control the narrative, reframing the exits as necessary rather than a problem to dress up.
In total, at least 11 engineers, including the two co-founders, publicly announced their departure from xAI last week — though two of those exits appear to have happened a few weeks ago.
Three of the departing staff members said they will be starting something new with other former xAI engineers, though no details about the new venture are available. Others hint at a desire for more autonomy and smaller teams to build cutting-edge technology faster, pointing to the expected increase in AI productivity.
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Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, co-founder of xAI and chief reasoning officer; he said in a post announcing his resignation: “It’s time for my next chapter. It’s an era of full potential: a small team armed with AI can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”
Shayan Salehian, who worked on product infrastructure and model behavior after training at xAI and previously worked at Twitter/X, he said last week he was leaving to “start something new”.
Vahid Kazemi, who had a brief career in machine learning, posted on Tuesday which he left a few weeks ago, adding: “IMO, all the AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it’s boring… So, I’m starting something new.”
Roland Gavrilescu, a former xAI engineer, left in November to start Nuraline, a company that makes “artificial intelligence products,” but posted again on Tuesday that he was leaving the company to build “something new with others who left xAI.”
The departures come at a time of significant controversy for xAI. Company faces regulatory scrutiny after Grok created non-consensual explicit deepfakes of women and children that spread on X — French authorities last week raided X offices under investigation. The company is also moving toward a planned IPO later this year after being legally acquired by SpaceX last week.
Musk also faces personal controversy after records released by the Justice Department show extensive conversations with convicted rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The emails show Musk discussing a visit to Epstein’s Island on two separate occasions, in 2012 and 2013. Epstein was first convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008.
xAI maintains a number of people from over 1,000 employeestherefore the exits are unlikely to affect the company’s short-term potential. However, the rapid pace of recent departures has taken on a life of its own online, with users jokingly announcing on X that they too are “leaving xAI” despite never having worked there – a sign of how quickly the narrative of a “mass exit” has fallen on Musk’s social network.
However, forced co-founder exits are rarely a sign of smooth scaling. While Musk is framing the reorganization as calculated, the fact that several engineers have followed co-founders out the door—and that at least three are starting something new together—suggests that the departures may also reflect deeper tensions. In frontier AI, where talent is scarce and reputation matters, xAI’s ability to attract and retain top researchers will be tested as it competes with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
TechCrunch reached out to xAI for more information.
Schedule of departure announcements
The following employees have publicly announced their departures from xAI at X in recent days:
February 6: Ayush Jaiswalengineer, wrote: “This was my last week at xAI. I’ll take a few months to spend time with family and work on AI.”
February 7: Sayan Salehianwho worked on product infrastructure and model behavior after training and was previously at X, wrote: “I left xAI to start something new, closing the chapter of 7+ years working on Twitter, X and xAI with so much gratitude.” He added that working closely with Elon Musk taught him “obsessive attention to detail, manic urgency and to think from the ground up.”
February 9: Simon ZhaiMTS (Member of Technical Staff), wrote: “Today is my last day at xAI, I feel very lucky for the opportunity. It’s been an amazing journey.”
February 9: Yuhuai (Tony) Wuco-founder and head of reasoning, wrote: “I stepped down from xAI today. It’s time for my next chapter. It’s an era of full potential: a small team armed with AI can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”
February 10: Jimmy Baco-founder and head of research/security, wrote: “Last day at xAI. We’re headed for an age of 100x productivity with the right tools. Iterative self-improvement loops will likely work over the next 12 months. It’s time to recalibrate my big-picture slant. 2026 is very important (and the most important year) for our species.”
February 10: Vahid Kazemian ML PhD, wrote that he had left xAI “a few weeks ago”, adding: “IMO, all AI labs build exactly the same thing and it’s boring. I think there’s room for more creativity. So, I’m starting something new.”
February 10: Hang Gaowho worked on multimodal efforts including Grok Imagine, wrote: “I left xAI today.” He described his time there as “really rewarding”, citing contributions to Grok Imagine releases and praising the team’s “humble craftsmanship and ambitious vision”.
February 10: Roland Gavrilescuengineer who left in November to start Nuraline, posted: “Leaved xAI. Building something new with others who left xAI. Hiring :)”
February 10: Chase Leemember of the founding team of Macrohard, wrote: “Taking a short reset and then back to the border.” (Macrohard is an AI-only software venture under xAI designed to fully automate software development, coding, and operations using multi-agent systems powered by Grok. Its name is a dig at Microsoft.)
February 11: Andrew Mawho has been at xAI since X was called Twitter, worked on app and recommendation model improvements, including the “X video feed, search bar, user modeling, starter-packs, and home streaming model.” He wrote: “I’m excited for the future – not sure what I’ll do yet (my DMs are open) but there’s a world to change and no time to waste. Go team, stay focused, stay strong, I can’t wait to see you all on the moon and beyond, trust me when I say there’s no one I trust more in the whole world to get there.”
February 12: Radhakrishnan (Rad) Venkataramaniwho worked on reasoning and reinforcement learning systems for Grok, wrote: “The last 8 months on the RL/SWE-RL systems team pushing our coding model to be SOTA and towards iterative self-improvement will always be the most memorable of my life… We are at an inflection point where intelligence is starting to skyrocket and it only gets faster from here.”
This article was originally published on February 11 and has been updated to include additional employee departures.
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