Every Original xAI Co-Founder Has Now Left the Company

The last of xAI’s original co-founders has departed. Ross Nordeen, a key operational aide to Elon Musk, left on Friday, March 27 — just days after Manuel Kroiss, who led pretraining efforts, walked out earlier in the week. With their departures, all 11 original co-founders (excluding Musk himself) have now exited the company.

The exodus accelerated in early 2026 following SpaceX’s $250 billion all-stock acquisition of xAI in February. Other notable departures include Jimmy Ba (research, safety, and enterprise), Yuhuai “Tony” Wu (reasoning team lead), Zihang Dai, and Guodong Zhang — all leaving in March. Musk acknowledged the situation publicly, stating that xAI “was not built right the first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”

The restructuring comes as SpaceX prepares for an IPO later this year, and the departures are fueling intense talent competition across the AI industry.

Source

Business Insider · The Next Web · Benzinga

Commentary

Losing your entire founding team is not a reorganization — it’s a reset. Musk’s framing of “rebuilding from the foundations up” is remarkably candid, but it raises hard questions about what went wrong. xAI launched with an exceptional roster of DeepMind and Google Brain alumni; losing all of them in under three years suggests deep cultural or strategic disagreements, not just normal turnover.

The SpaceX acquisition adds another layer of complexity. Folding an AI research lab into a rocket company’s corporate structure is unconventional, to say the least. With a SpaceX IPO looming, the pressure to show Grok and xAI’s capabilities as value drivers is immense — and doing that without any of the people who built the original technology is going to be a serious challenge. The AI talent market is white-hot right now, and every one of those departed co-founders is a recruitment win for someone else.