All 11 xAI Co-Founders Leave Company After Three Years

Final Co-Founder Ross Nordeen Resigns

xAI logo. Photo by Reuters and Yonhap News

All 11 co-founders who established the artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI alongside Elon Musk have left the company.

According to Business Insider on the 29th (local time), co-founder Ross Nordeen has resigned. The badge indicating his employment at xAI has disappeared from his profile on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Nordeen was the last remaining co-founder at the company.

Nordeen had previously worked as a technical program manager for Tesla's autonomous driving team before joining xAI as a founding member in 2023, and had been considered a key confidant who reported directly to Musk.

Another co-founder, Manuel Kroiss, who had remained at xAI with Nordeen, also recently announced his intention to resign. Kroiss, who previously worked at Google, led pre-training of AI models and improvements to coding models.

With the departures of Nordeen and Kroiss, all 11 co-founders who launched the company with Elon Musk have now resigned after about three years. Of these, eight left the company in succession since January.

This large-scale exodus accelerated in the wake of xAI's controversy over the generation of child sexual exploitation imagery at the end of last year, as well as around the time of SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI.

Regarding the exodus, Musk responded on X by saying, "The personnel suitable for the early stage is different from those needed during the growth stage," and added, "There are very few departures that I regret."

He also emphasized, "Since xAI was not properly built at the beginning, we are now rebuilding it from the ground up."

The Next Web (TNW), an information technology (IT) media outlet owned by the Financial Times (FT), pointed out in relation to Musk's remarks, "The mass departure of xAI’s co-founders follows a pattern that has been repeated at several companies run by Musk."

TNW added, "The fact that they all decided to leave at a time when the company was valued at 250 billion dollars and had access to SpaceX’s resources suggests that the problems at xAI are not fundamentally financial or infrastructure-related," and emphasized, "The issue is organizational."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.