In the past 2 days, two co-founders of xAI announced their departure from the company. Since then, 6 out of 12 people have left the startup team, with five layoffs in the last year.
In the past 2 days, two co-founders of xAI announced their departure from the company. Since then, 6 out of 12 people have left the startup team, with five layoffs in the last year.
According to TechCrunch, co-founder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced his departure in an overnight post on X, writing: «It’s time for my next chapter,» and adding that now «a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.» Less than a day later, co-founder Jimmy Ba also announced that he was leaving the company, thanking Elon Musk for his «incredible journey,» noting that he «will continue to stay close as a friend of the team.»
The article emphasizes that this is a continuation of a series of departures among the founders. Infrastructure lead Kyle Kosik left the company in mid-2024 and moved to OpenAI. Next came Christian Szegedi, a Google veteran, whose dismissal was reported in February 2025. In August 2025, Igor Babushkin left xAI and founded a venture firm. Another co-founder, Greg Young, left last month, citing health problems.
The authors of the article note that the statements about leaving looked friendly, and such changes may be natural at a stage when the startup enters a more mature phase. Among the possible factors are the high intensity of work, financial incentives against the background of upcoming corporate events and the desire of some researchers to launch their own projects. At the same time, the text also mentions reputational risks surrounding the company’s products, in particular the Grok chatbot and image generation tools.
In three years, xAI has gone from a «startup team of 12 co-founders» to a situation where half of them have already left, and ahead, according to the source, the company may face additional attention due to big corporate plans and preparations for new stages of development.
dev.ua previously reported how Suleiman Gori, an engineer at Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI, appeared on the Relentless podcast last week to talk about the inner workings of the company he joined less than a year ago. He left xAI a few days later, although there is speculation that he was fired for being too outspoken.
