Only two of xAI's original eleven co-founders remain at the company.
Zihang Dai left last week. Guodong Zhang is expected to follow in coming days. They join Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang on the list of departed co-founders, leaving only Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen from the founding team. In a single week in February, at least nine engineers walked out the door.
Musk characterized the departures as "push, not pull" - he forced them out. On X, he posted: "xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up. Same thing happened with Tesla." He also publicly apologized for past hiring decisions, saying he and HR head Baris Akis are going through old interview records to reach out to previously rejected candidates.
The personnel losses have hit xAI's most ambitious project hardest. Macrohard, an effort to build an AI coding platform that would compete with Microsoft using screenshot-based training, has stalled. Staff departures, leadership changes, and what appears to be a hiring freeze have slowed progress. Some of Macrohard's computing resources are reportedly being redirected to Tesla's Autopilot team and a new project called Digital Optimus, an AI agent designed to handle computer-based tasks.
To backfill talent, xAI poached two senior product engineering leaders from Cursor: Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, both reporting directly to Musk. Cursor is the AI coding startup that recently hit $2 billion in annualized revenue, so these are not cheap hires.
The timing is messy. SpaceX merged with xAI in February. Tesla invested $2 billion in xAI in January. There is a lot of money flowing between Musk's companies, but the people who actually built xAI's technology keep leaving. Rebuilding a research lab's culture and institutional knowledge is harder than writing a check, and Musk has now admitted as much.