All 11 xAI Co-Founders Have Now Left — Musk Says He Is 'Rebuilding From the Foundations Up'
The departure of Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen — Elon Musk's last remaining xAI co-founders — completes a full exodus of all 11 original founders. Musk acknowledged the company 'was not built right the first time around.' xAI has since been absorbed into SpaceX, consolidating Musk's AI, social media, and space infrastructure under a single corporate umbrella.
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Elon Musk no longer has any of the people who co-founded xAI working at the company. Manuel Kroiss, who led pretraining, and Ross Nordeen, described internally as Musk's operational right hand, departed in the final week of March 2026 — completing a full exodus that began in January and accelerated through February and March. All 11 original xAI co-founders are gone.
The departures unfolded over roughly ninety days. Greg Yang left in January after being diagnosed with Lyme disease. Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic, and Christian Szegedy followed. February saw Zihang Dai, Guodong Zhang, Tony Wu, Toby Pohlen, and Jimmy Ba exit. Kroiss and Nordeen were the last. The names represent the core team that designed Grok's pretraining architecture and the initial infrastructure xAI was built on.
Musk's Own Assessment
In an unusually candid acknowledgment, Elon Musk publicly stated that xAI "was not built right the first time around" and that the company is "being rebuilt from the foundations up." The admission is notable given Musk's public persona and the extent to which xAI has been positioned as a direct competitor to OpenAI — an organization Musk co-founded and departed on acrimonious terms.
The "rebuild" framing raises more questions than it answers. What, specifically, was built wrong? The technical architecture? The team structure? The model training approach? Musk has not elaborated. The public framing may also be selective: rebuilding from foundations is a narrative that converts a talent exodus into a strategic reboot.
The SpaceX Consolidation
The co-founder departures coincide with a structural shift: xAI has been absorbed into SpaceX, consolidating xAI, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter) under one corporate umbrella. The integration gives xAI access to SpaceX's compute infrastructure and data center resources — a meaningful advantage in the GPU-constrained market — while creating questions about AI governance in an entity that includes satellite internet, rocket manufacturing, and social media.
The Grok chatbot, xAI's primary consumer product, faces ongoing regulatory scrutiny over content moderation and data practices. An anticipated SpaceX IPO, which xAI's valuations are now entangled with, would require disclosures about AI operations that Musk has historically resisted.
