Amid a merger with SpaceX, a $60 billion option to acquire the AI company Cursor, and an upcoming public offering, Elon Musk’s xAI firm is still losing employees.
Every xAI cofounder, other than Musk, has now exited the company. Dozens of people who served on xAI’s engineering and program staff have also departed, a Fast Company review shows. This overlaps with a significant share of the people meant to direct the startup under a new organizational structure that was only announced in February.
While it’s natural for employees to come and go from any company, the string of xAI departures—and these are only the publicly searchable ones—is notable because they come as Musk continues to reorient xAI’s overall direction and contend with criticism of the company’s flagship chatbot, Grok. Fast Company ultimately identified about 80 people, including cofounders, technical staff, and legal advisors, who have departed xAI within the past year or so.
It’s not publicly known how many people currently work at xAI in total, though Business Insider reported that about 1,200 people were employed at the company as of last March. (xAI and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.)
Founded in 2023, xAI is supposed to be focused on building “maximally curious” and “pro-humanity” AI systems that compete with models under development at companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. xAI’s founding members included a range of employees who previously worked at firms like Google’s DeepMind and OpenAI, including Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic, and Christian Szegedy.
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But the company has continued to face a crowded field of AI labs offering large language models to consumers, enterprise businesses, and even the U.S. government. It’s also faced a notable surge in staff exits amid an AI talent war that’s seen top engineers shuffle between some of the world’s most valuable tech companies.
This month alone, another cluster of staff at Musk’s LLM venture indicated they’re leaving xAI. The most notable example is Anthony Armstrong, who, according to The Information, is resigning his post as chief financial officer after only a few months. Heinrich “Heiner” Kuttler—who Musk earlier this year said would be involved in directing the company’s compute and infrastructure team—said on X earlier this month that he was leaving, too.
Other notable recent exits include Jack Schwaiger, who resigned after more than a year on the STEM and medicine tutor teams, and Jeffrey Weischel, who worked on the company’s program staff. Scott Fitzgerald, a member of the technical staff, is also leaving; Jesik Min, another member of the technical staff, updated their LinkedIn to note their time at xAI ended this month.
xAI’s evolving focus
These departures have come amid transformative changes in xAI’s organizational structure—in particular, its deepening relationship with other Musk-led companies. Last spring, xAI merged with X, Musk’s social media company, into one venture.
Another major shift came this past fall, when xAI shifted its approach and scaled back a plan to improve Grok using generalist human AI trainers, called “AI tutors”, that were meant to teach Grok. xAI subsequently laid off hundreds of people as part of the “strategic pivot” to focusing on tutors with more specialized expertise.
Then, in early February, xAI initiated a merger with SpaceX as part of a new plan that partially involves building orbital data centers. Amid these changes, xAI cofounders had already begun leaving the company. By February 11, cofounders Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba had resigned, leaving xAI with just half of its original founders.
That week, Musk also called a company all-hands, where he acknowledged that people were leaving and subsequently announced a new internal structure, per video of the meeting that xAI released online.
At that all-hands meeting, several presenters, including Musk, encouraged employees to recruit their friends to join xAI, and Musk touted the company’s progress launching Grokipedia and its training centers, as well as success with products like Imagine and Grok.
“When you first have a startup, you might have just a few dozen people, and they will just chat amongst themselves. As you grow to several hundred people, you have to, then, add more structure, just like an organism that grows from a single cell. . . . Then you get organ differentiation, limbs. You grow a tail. . . . The tail disappears, and then you become a baby,” Musk said in his opening remarks.
“We’re organizing the company to be more effective at this scale. Naturally, when this happens, there are some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages,” Musk added, before thanking the people who had left.
As part of this new plan, xAI was divided into infrastructure layers, and then four main areas: Grok Main and Voice (its main AI product), Coding (its coding-specific model), Imagine (for video and images), and Macrohard (digital simulations of entire companies). Several longtime employees and cofounders were also appointed to steer those efforts.
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Now, only a few weeks later, it appears—at least based on the first names and nicknames listed on the organizational chart displayed on a presentation screen during that all-hands—that many of the leaders involved in the February restructuring have since left, including several additional original co-founders.
These employees include Haotian Liu and Guodong Zhang, who were both supposed to be leading Grok Imagine, an image generator and AI assistant for code. Liu said he was “burnt out” and taking a break, and Zhang said he was excited about his next chapter. Toby Pohlen, a founding member of the company who was supposed to be leading Macrohard, has left the company, as well as Manuel Kroiss, who is sometimes called “Makro” internally. It’s not immediately clear what either is or will be doing next. Lianmin Zheng, who, it seems, was supposed to be working on machine learning and data infrastructure, has left the company for Meta.
Amid transition and scandal, the departures continue
In the midst of all this turnover, xAI has continued to evolve its approach to the AI business. In March, Musk said that the company was going to be rebuilt. xAI also announced a collaboration: a joint project with Tesla that would apparently involve integrating Grok and Tesla’s hardware and software.
“Grok is the master conductor/navigator with deep understanding of the world to direct digital Optimus, which is processing and actioning the past 5 secs of real-time computer screen video and keyboard/mouse actions,” Musk explained in an X post in March. “Grok is like a much more advanced and sophisticated version of turn-by-turn navigation software.”
Now, and ahead of the upcoming IPO, the company is reorganizing xAI’s engineering team yet again. This week, Musk’s composite venture forged a new $60 billion deal with Cursor AI, a coding startup that SpaceX now has the rights to acquire.
Notably, departures from xAI also follow several concerning incidents involving Grok. These include the chatbot declaring itself “MechaHitler” and posting antisemitic content online last year. Earlier this year, the chatbot was observed, by researchers, producing millions of nonconsensual pornographic materials, including sexual images of children (As a result, xAI is now under investigation in several countries). The company announced changes in response to both scandals. xAI has also faced serious criticism, and even a lawsuit, about air pollution in Memphis, where the company has established data center operations.
Below is a Fast Company tracker of notable departures from xAI:
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