The last of Elon Musk's original xAI co-founders have walked out the door.
Manuel Kroiss announced his departure on Wednesday, and Ross Nordeen followed on Friday, completing a full exodus of all 11 co-founders from the company Musk launched in 2023. Nine others had already left earlier in March. That means xAI, the company behind the Grok chatbot, now has zero co-founders besides Musk himself.
Musk's response was surprisingly candid. He acknowledged that xAI "was not built right the first time around" and said the company is being rebuilt from scratch. That's a striking admission for a company that has raised billions, built one of the largest GPU clusters in the world, and competes directly with OpenAI and Google.
The timing raises questions. Losing your entire founding team isn't a normal growing pain. Co-founder departures happen at every startup, but all 11 leaving within weeks of each other suggests something more systemic than individual career moves. Whether this is about strategic disagreements, culture, or Musk's management style (which has driven similar exoduses at Twitter/X), the optics are rough.
For Grok users, the practical impact is unclear. xAI still employs hundreds of engineers and researchers, and Grok continues to ship updates. But founding teams carry institutional knowledge and vision that's hard to replace, especially in a field where talent is the entire competitive advantage. Musk clearly believes a reset is what xAI needs. The question is whether rebuilding from scratch helps or just means starting the clock over while competitors like Anthropic and Google keep pulling ahead.