xAI's 11 Cofounders Exit Amid Restructuring

All 11 cofounders of Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI have departed the company, completing a full turnover of its original leadership team amid a major corporate restructuring following its acquisition by SpaceX.

The final two exits occurred in recent days. Manuel Kroiss, who led xAI's pretraining team responsible for developing foundational AI models, informed colleagues of his departure earlier this month. Ross Nordeen, described as Musk's right-hand operator and a key figure in operational matters, left on Friday. Both reported directly to Musk. Nordeen previously worked at Tesla and played a role in major organizational changes at X, formerly Twitter, after Musk's 2022 acquisition of the platform.

The departures mark the end of a rapid exodus that began accelerating in early 2026. Christian Szegedy, a former Google researcher, left in February 2025, followed by Tony Wu, who led the reasoning team, on February 10, 2026. Jimmy Ba, coauthor of the influential 2014 Adam optimization paper in AI, resigned shortly afterward amid reported tensions over efforts to enhance model performance. By mid-March, only Kroiss and Nordeen remained. The original cofounders,...