Elon Musk is addressing a wave of departures from xAI, including two more co-founders who left this week, bringing the total to six out of the original 12.
At an all-hands meeting Tuesday night, Musk suggested the exits were about fit, not performance. “Because we’ve reached a certain scale, we’re organizing the company to be more effective at this scale,” he said, according to The New York Times. “And actually, when this happens, there’s some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages.”
Wednesday afternoon on X, he went further, making clear these departures weren’t voluntary. “xAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve speed of execution,” Musk wrote. “As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve just like any living organism. This unfortunately required parting ways with some people.”
He added that the company is “hiring aggressively” and closed with a quintessentially Musk pitch: “Join xAI if the idea of mass drivers on the Moon appeals to you.”
Losing half your co-founders in a relatively short period raises questions, and Musk’s comments seem designed to control the narrative, reframing the exits as necessary rather than a problem for the outfit.
In total, at least nine engineers, including the two co-founders, have publicly announced their departure from xAI in the past week — though two of those exits appear to have occurred a few weeks ago.
Three of the departing staff members have said they will be starting something new alongside other former xAI engineers, although no details are available about the new venture. Others have hinted at a desire for more autonomy and smaller teams to build frontier tech more rapidly, pointing to the anticipated surge in AI productivity.
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June 23, 2026
Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, an xAI co-founder and reasoning lead, said in a post announcing his resignation: …