Elon Musk lost two xAI co-founders in two days this week in what news agencies are calling an “exodus” form the company.
Musk founded the company with 11 others in 2023. Six of them have left, according to Silicon Republic. News of the most recent departures came Tuesday with announcements on X.
Yuhuai (Tony) Wu said, simply, “I resigned from xAI today,” in an early-Tuesday-morning tweet. He said it was “time for my next chapter.”
“This company — and the family we became — will stay with me forever,” Wu tweeted. “I will deeply miss the people, the warrooms, and all those battles we have fought together.”
Jimmy Ba tweeted, “last day at xAI,” Tuesday evening.
“We are heading to an age of 100x productivity with the right tools,” Ba tweeted. “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.”
Other co-founders Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic, and Christian Szegedy, have departed the company in recent years.
The two latest departures come right after Musk’s SpaceX merged with xAI. The deal valued xAI at $250 billion and SpaceX at $1 trillion in what CBNC called the largest merger of all time. The merger deal precedes what many expect to be a record-setting IPO for the company.
The moves come after, though, xAI found itself in trouble all over the globe. Its generative AI Grok had the ability to generate sexualized images of children and women.
For this, access to Grok was blocked in Indonesia and Malaysia. Government officials in India have demanded explanations from the company, while regulators in the United Kingdom formally opened an investigation.
In response, the company restricted the image-generation tool to paid subscribers. Later, it restricted the ability to everyone, the company said.