Six out of twelve founding members gone. That's the math at xAI right now, and it's not adding up to confidence.
In a single week, nine engineers publicly announced their departures from Elon Musk's AI company. Among them: Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, the reasoning lead, and Jimmy Ba, who handled research and safety. Both co-founders. Both now planning their "next chapters."
The exodus reads like a corporate death march:
- February 6: Ayush Jaiswal waves goodbye
- February 9: Simon Zhai calls it "an amazing journey"
- February 10: Wu announces he's done
- February 11: Ba thanks Musk and exits
That's just the headliners. Product infrastructure specialist Shayan Salehian, multimodal developer Hang Gao, and ML researcher Vahid Kazemi also headed for the exits.
The Founding Fathers Are Fleeing
This isn't xAI's first rodeo with founder flight. Infrastructure lead Kyle Kosic jumped to OpenAI mid-2024. Christian Szegedy left in February 2025. Igor Babuschkin started a venture firm in August. Greg Yang cited "health issues" in January 2026.
Seeing a pattern yet?
<> "A small team armed with AIs can move mountains," Wu posted on his way out. Translation: We can do this better without you, Elon./>
Three departing engineers are already planning a new venture with other ex-xAI talent. They're betting on small, autonomous teams over whatever xAI has become under SpaceX's recent acquisition.
What Nobody Is Talking About
The timing stinks worse than a Tesla factory bathroom. xAI just got absorbed by SpaceX ahead of a planned IPO later this year. Half your founding team bailing during integration and pre-IPO prep? That's not a red flag—that's a crimson banner visible from orbit.
Industry sources are calling this a "troubling pattern." No kidding. When your reasoning lead and safety lead both decide they'd rather roll the dice on a startup than stick around for your IPO payday, something's rotting in the state of xAI.
The company has grown to over 1,000 employees, so losing nine doesn't crater the headcount. But these aren't junior developers. Wu came from OpenAI and Google. Ba's a University of Toronto alum with serious ML chops. When your brain trust starts thinking with their feet, you've got problems.
Grok's Shaky Foundation
xAI's flagship Grok model now faces development without its core reasoning architect and safety lead. The company was already playing catch-up to OpenAI and Anthropic. Losing institutional knowledge right as they're trying to scale multimodal features and agentic workflows?
Good luck with that orbital data center, Elon.
The departing engineers aren't staying quiet about their motivations either. They're explicitly talking about the power of "small teams" and "rapid frontier tech development." Read between the lines: xAI got too big, too bureaucratic, too... corporate.
Classic Musk paradox—the man who rails against corporate bloat creating exactly that.
The Silence Speaks Volumes
Neither xAI nor Musk has commented on the departures. Radio silence while your founding team publicly announces they're done? That's either supreme confidence or complete denial.
I've seen enough AI hype cycles to know which one this looks like.
The hot AI funding market means these departing engineers won't struggle to find backing. They're taking xAI's institutional knowledge and betting they can do it better as a lean startup. Meanwhile, xAI gets to explain to IPO investors why half their founding team decided the grass was greener literally anywhere else.
Six founders down. Six to go. Place your bets on how long the remainder stick around post-IPO.
