Elon Musk suggests spate of xAI exits have been push, not pull

Elon Musk is addressing a wave of departures from xAI, including two more co-founders who left this week, bringing the total to six out of the original 12.

At an all-hands meeting Tuesday night, Musk suggested the exits were about fit, not performance. “Because we’ve reached a certain scale, we’re organizing the company to be more effective at this scale,” he said, according to The New York Times. “And actually, when this happens, there’s some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages.”

Wednesday afternoon on X, he went further, making clear these departures weren’t voluntary. “xAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve speed of execution,” Musk wrote. “As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve just like any living organism. This unfortunately required parting ways with some people.”

He added that the company is “hiring aggressively” and closed with a quintessentially Musk pitch: “Join xAI if the idea of mass drivers on the Moon appeals to you.”

Losing half your co-founders in a relatively short period raises questions, and Musk’s comments seem designed to control the narrative, reframing the exits as necessary rather than a problem for the outfit.

In total, at least 11 engineers, including the two co-founders, have publicly announced their departure from xAI in the past week — though two of those exits appear to have occurred a few weeks ago.

Three of the departing staff members have said they will be starting something new alongside other former xAI engineers, although no details are available about the new venture. Others have hinted at a desire for more autonomy and smaller teams to build frontier tech more rapidly, pointing to the anticipated surge in AI productivity.

Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, an xAI co-founder and reasoning lead, said in a post announcing his resignation: “It’s time for my next chapter. It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”

Shayan Salehian, who worked on product infrastructure and model behavior post-training at xAI and previously worked at Twitter/X, said last week he was leaving to “start something new.” 

Vahid Kazemi, who had a brief stint working on machine learning, posted Tuesday that he left a few weeks ago, adding: “IMO, all 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 building “forward-deployed AI agents,” but posted again on Tuesday that he left the firm to build “something new with others that left xAI.”

The departures come at a moment of significant controversy for xAI. The company is facing regulatory scrutiny after Grok created nonconsensual explicit deepfakes of women and children that were disseminated on X — French authorities last week raided X offices as part of an investigation. The company is also moving toward a planned IPO later this year, after being legally acquired by SpaceX last week.

Musk is also facing personal controversy after files published by the Justice Department show extended 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 headcount of over 1,000 employees, so the departures are unlikely to affect the company’s short-term capabilities. Still, the rapid pace of the recent departures had 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 exodus” snowballed on Musk’s social network.

Still, forced co-founder exits are rarely a sign of smooth scaling. While Musk frames the reorganization as calculated, the fact that several engineers followed the co-founders out the door — and that at least three are starting something new together — suggests 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 has reached out to xAI for more information.

Timeline of departure announcements

The following employees have publicly announced their departures from xAI on X in recent days:

February 6:  Ayush Jaiswal, engineer, wrote: “This was my last week at xAI. Will be taking a few months to spend time with family & tinker with AI.”

February 7: Shayan Salehian, who worked on product infrastructure and model behavior post-training and was previously at X, wrote: “I left xAI to start something new, closing my 7+ year chapter working at Twitter, X, and xAI with so much gratitude.” He added that working closely with Elon Musk taught him “obsessive attention to detail, maniacal urgency, and to think from first principles.”

February 9: Simon Zhai, MTS (member of technical staff), wrote: “Today is my last day at xAI, feeling very fortunate about the opportunity. It has been an amazing journey.”

February 9: Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, co-founder and reasoning lead, wrote: “I resigned from xAI today. It’s time for my next chapter. It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”

February 10: Jimmy Ba, co-founder and research/safety lead, wrote: “Last day at xAI. We are heading to an age of 100x productivity with the right tools. Recursive self improvement loops likely go live in the next 12 months. It’s time to recalibrate my gradient on the big picture. 2026 is gonna be insane and likely the busiest (and most consequential) year for the future of our species.”

February 10: Vahid Kazemi, an ML PhD, wrote that he had left xAI “a few weeks ago,” adding: “IMO, all AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it’s boring. I think there’s room for more creativity. So, I’m starting something new.”

February 10: Hang Gao, who worked on multimodal efforts, including Grok Imagine, wrote: “I left xAI today.” He described his time there as “truly rewarding,” citing contributions to Grok Imagine’s releases and praising the team’s “humble craftsmanship and ambitious vision.”

February 10: Roland Gavrilescu, the engineer who left in November to start Nuraline, posted: “I left xAI. Building something new with others that left xAI. We’re hiring :)”

February 10: Chace Lee, a member of the Macrohard founding team, wrote: “Taking a brief reset, then back to the frontier.” (Macrohard is an AI-only software venture under xAI designed to fully automate software development, coding, and operations using Grok-powered, multi-agent systems. Its name is a dig at Microsoft.)

February 11: Andrew Ma, who had 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 the home feed model.” He wrote: “I’m excited about the future — not sure what I’ll be doing yet (my DMs are open), but there is a world to be changed and no time to waste. Go team, stay focused, be energized, I can’t wait to see you all on the moon and beyond, believe me when I say there is no one that I trust more on the entire planet to get there, there is a world to win.”

February 12: Radhakrishnan (Rad) Venkataramani, who worked on reasoning and reinforcement learning systems for Grok, wrote: “The last 8 months in RL systems/SWE-RL team pushing our coding model to be SOTA and toward recursive self improvement, will always be the most memorable of my lifetime … We’re at an inflection point where intelligence begins accelerating itself, and from here the trajectory only goes vertical.”

This article was originally published February 11 and has been updated to include additional employee departures.

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