xAI’s last remaining co-founder departs
Elon Musk’s last original co-founder left the company this week, according to Business Insider.
elon musk and person in the dark with xAI logo. Image by Cybernews.
Elon Musk’s last original co-founder left the company this week, according to Business Insider.
- Ross Nordeen, xAI's last original co-founder, left this week, ending the tenure of all 11 founding members who launched with Elon Musk.
- Eight co-founders have departed since January, including key AI and machine learning leaders who reported directly to Musk.
- The company has restructured and lost dozens of employees recently, though it continues recruiting in finance and banking.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
One of the original 11 people who helped build xAI, Ross Nordeen, left the company this week, Business Insider reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
A badge on X, which identified Nordeen as an xAI employee, has also been removed.
Nordeen reported directly to Musk and was responsible for coordinating priorities and driving execution across the company, the publication says.
He joined Musk from Tesla, where he worked on building data centers for training its Full Self-Driving system, to co-found xAI.
According to Business Insider, Nordeen is a longtime friend of Musk's cousin, James Musk. He was also one of the engineers who helped Musk coordinate major layoffs at Twitter after the 2022 takeover.
Eight co-founders have left xAI since January, namely Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang. The list also includes Manuel Kroiss, who led pretraining and reported directly to Musk – similar to Nordeen, he left this week. All of the original co-founders were from the AI and deep machine learning fields.
The company has undergone several restructurings and has lost dozens of employees over the last few months, but it’s still actively seeking new talent. For example, earlier in March, it was reported that xAI is searching for bankers and finance specialists to train its chatbot Grok on financial markets.
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But in general, the company is lagging behind its high-profile rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of ecosystem and scale. xAI is also heavily tied to X, and Grok mainly “feeds” on information and behavioral patterns it finds on X.
Musk recently said that “xAI was not built right first time around, so [it] is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”
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