Elon Musk suggests spate of xAI exits have been push, not pull

Source: TechCrunch

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 yesterday, 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.”

On X Wednesday afternoon, he went further, making clear these departures weren’t voluntary (tweet):

“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.

TechCrunch event

Individual departures

• Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, xAI co‑founder and reasoning lead, said in a post announcing his resignation:

  “It’s time for my next chapter. It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”

• Shayan Salehian, who worked on product infrastructure and model‑behavior post‑training at xAI (previously at Twitter/X), said last week he was leaving to “start something new.”

  Career update: I left xAI to start something new, closing my 7+ year chapter working at Twitter, X, and xAI with so much gratitude.

  xAI is truly an extraordinary place. The team is incredibly hardcore and talented, shipping at a pace that shouldn’t be possible. From the Home…

  — Shayan (@shayan_) February 7, 2026

• Vahid Kazemi, who had a brief stint working on machine learning, posted Tuesday that he left a few weeks ago, adding:

  “IMO, all AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it’s boring … So, I’m starting something new.”

• Roland Gavrilescu, a former xAI engineer, left in November to start Nuraline (building “forward‑deployed AI agents”), but posted again on Tuesday that he left the firm to build “something new with others that left xAI.”

Contextual backdrop

The departures come at a moment of significant controversy for xAI:

• The company is facing regulatory scrutiny after Grok created non‑consensual explicit deepfakes of women and children that were disseminated on X – French authorities raided X offices as part of an investigation.
• xAI is moving toward a planned IPO later this year, after being legally acquired by SpaceX last week.
• Musk is also facing personal controversy after files published by the Justice Department show extended conversations with convicted rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, including discussions of a visit to Epstein’s island in 2012 and 2013.

Impact assessment

• xAI maintains a headcount of over 1,000 employees (Business Insider), so the departures are unlikely to affect the company’s short‑term capabilities.
• The rapid pace of recent departures has taken on a life of its own online, with users jokingly announcing on X that they too are “leaving xAI” despite never having worked there – a sign of how quickly the narrative of a “mass exodus” snowballed on Musk’s social network.

Final thoughts

Forced co‑founder exits are rarely a sign of smooth scaling. While Musk frames the reorganization as calculated, the fact that several engineers followed the co‑founders out the door — and that at least three are starting something new together — suggests the departures may also reflect deeper tensions. In frontier AI, where talent is scarce and reputation matters, such churn can have long‑term implications for both the company’s culture and its competitive standing.

xAI’s ability to attract and retain top researchers will be tested as it competes with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

TechCrunch has reached out to xAI for more information.

Timeline of Departure Announcements

The following employees have publicly announced their departures from xAI on X (formerly Twitter) in recent days.

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