Of the eleven-member team with which Elon Musk founded his AI company xAI in 2023, no one remains today. The exodus follows an acquisition by aerospace company SpaceX and a thorough restructuring within the company.
None of the original eleven co-founders with whom Elon Musk founded xAI in 2023 is still employed. This is reported by the tech website TechCrunch, based on Business Insider’s reporting. The last two remaining members, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, left this week. Kroiss, who led the team that trains AI models on large datasets, told colleagues earlier that he was stepping down. Nordeen’s departure also became known on Friday.
Nordeen worked as Musk’s trusted right-hand man and coordinated the company’s day-to-day operations. He followed Elon Musk from Tesla to xAI in 2023. A year earlier, he had already helped with the massive round of layoffs following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
Thorough reconstruction
The exodus follows a period of major internal shifts within the company. Musk himself recently acknowledged that xAI was not properly set up in its early stages and is now being completely rebuilt.
Moreover, the start-up was recently acquired by SpaceX, the aerospace company whose CEO is also Musk. As a result of that move, SpaceX, xAI, and social media platform X now fall under a single overarching corporate structure. Meanwhile, SpaceX is preparing for an IPO that could potentially be one of the largest ever.
Lagging behind competitors
Although xAI is currently valued at an impressive 250 billion dollars (approximately 218 billion euros), the company is still struggling with technological growing pains. The start-up is having trouble convincing business customers, especially when companies want to use AI to automate their own programming. As a result, it still lags behind market leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of scale.
To bridge that gap, the start-up is now rapidly attracting fresh talent. Over the past few weeks, around ten new employees have already come on board. Among them are two senior profiles from Cursor, a company specialising in AI agents.
