Artificial Intelligence

Elon Musk increasingly alone. Two more co-founders leave xAI

Jimmy Ba and Toby Wu have announced their farewell to Musk's startup. Now half of the founders have left and relations between the CEO and staff are increasingly strained

by Massimo De Laurentiis

11 February 2026

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

In the space of two days xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence start-up, has lost two of its co-founders. Less than three years after the company's launch, Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu announced their farewells, marking the latest act in an exodus that began some time ago.

The first to announce his departure from the company was Jimmy Ba in a post on X, Musk's own social network. Shortly afterwards came a message from Tony Wu. Both thanked Musk and the members of xAI, but did not specify the reason for their choice.

The Exodus from xAI

With these last two resignations, the group of 12 original co-founders of xAI, which has seen many important farewells in the last two years, is halved.

The first of the co-founders to leave in 2024 was Kyle Kosic, who switched to rivals OpenAI. In February 2025 came the turn of Google veteran Christian Szegedy, who paved the way for the departure of Igor Babuschkin, who parted ways with Musk's strartup to found his own company. In January 2026, Greg Yang, formerly of Microsoft, also left the company after discovering he had Lyme disease.

In recent weeks, in addition to Yang, Ba and Wu, several researchers also reportedly quit, further reducing xAI's already compromised technical team.

Tensions with Musk

In these years of great turmoil in the Ai environment, frequent turnover even at the top is a common phenomenon. For some time, however, relations between leading figures at xAI and number one Musk have been complicated.

In September, the Wall Street Journal reported tensions between some of the company's executives and Musk's closest advisors. In particular, many were angered by management deemed inadequate and concerned about the uncertain outlook on the financial sustainability of the start-up.

In the past, the CEO's demands have come up against a reality slower and more complex than his ambitions. According to the Financial Times, some xAI employees have complained unrealistic expectations about the technical developments promised to Musk in the race against rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

On several occasions, Musk has expressed his frustration with results that have not lived up to his expectations, and recently, according to two sources with knowledge of the facts, he reviewed the performance of the leadership and reorganised the xAI units, believing that some were not performing well enough.

Grok's problems and the merger with SpaceX

Also contributing to this turbulent moment are the controversies concerning Grok, the company's flagship Large Language Model. Already in the past, the chatbot had come under indictment for invoking Hitler and posting anti-Semitic messages on X.

This year, a new wave of controversy concerned thegeneration of deepfakes and sexually explicit content. These problems led to formal investigations by the European Union and several countries, including the UK and France. An image damage that forced xAI to correct the mistakes while at the same time handling Musk's incessant demands.

Moreover, the recent merger of xAI with SpaceX seems to have exacerbated the internal turmoil. The purchase of the artificial intelligence startup by the space company creates a$1.250 billion group. Musk's stated goal is to realise an ambitious project to build data centres in space, which would serve to power increasingly advanced and energy-intensive Ai models.

Also according to the FT, the merger of the two companies will help Musk more easily raise finance for the purchase of chips, electricity and data centres to support xAI's growth.