Okay, now exactly half of the xAI founding team has left | TechCrunch

On Monday evening, xAI co-founder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced that he was leaving the company. “It’s time for my next chapter,” Wu wrote in an overnight post on X. “It’s an era of full possibilities: a small team armed with AI can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”

Less than a day later, on Tuesday afternoon, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who reported directly to Musk, said he too was bouncing back and posted a gracious message to X as he departed. “A huge thank you to @elonmusk for bringing us together on this incredible journey. I’m so proud of what the xAI team has accomplished and will continue to be close as a friend to the team,” it read in part.

Both were pretty standard technology departure announcements on their own – but part of a troubling pattern for the lab. Six members of the company’s 12-member founding team have now left the company, with five of them joining in the last year alone. Infrastructure head Kyle Kosic left for OpenAI in mid-2024, followed by Google veteran Christian Szegedy in February 2025. This August, Igor Babuschkin left to start a venture firm, and Microsoft alum Greg Yang left just last month, citing health issues.

By all accounts, the splits were amicable, and there are many reasons why, after nearly three years, some of the founders decided to move on. Elon Musk is a notoriously demanding boss, and with SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI completed and an IPO expected in the coming months, there’s a pretty big windfall for all involved. It’s a great time to be fundraising for an AI startup, so it’s only natural that high-level researchers want to strike out on their own.

There are also less friendly reasons to consider. The company’s flagship product, the Grok chatbot, has been plagued with bizarre behavior and apparent internal manipulations—the kind of thing that could easily cause friction in a tech team. Then there were the recent changes to xAI’s image generation tools that flooded the platform with deeply fake pornography, causing slow but real legal consequences.

Whatever the cause, the cumulative impact is alarming. Much work remains to be done at xAI, and the IPO will bring more scrutiny than the lab has ever faced before. With Musk already hatching plans for orbital data centers, the pressure to get those plans right will be intense. The pace of model development is unrelenting, and if Grok can’t 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 retain all the AI ​​talent it can.