Elon Musk’s xAI appears to be going through a turbulent phase at a time when expectations around the company are sky high. Even as Musk talks up bold ambitions for the future of artificial intelligence, the startup is seeing key figures head for the exit.
In the latest setback, xAI has lost its second co-founder in just two days, raising fresh questions about stability within the company.
The churn continued on Tuesday when influential AI researcher Jimmy Ba announced he was stepping away. In a post on X, Ba thanked Musk and reflected on his early involvement, writing that he was, “Grateful to have helped cofound at the start.”
Ba’s exit follows another high-level departure. Just a day earlier, fellow co-founder Tony Wu revealed that he too was leaving xAI.
The back-to-back resignations come shortly after xAI was merged with Musk’s aerospace venture SpaceX earlier this month, at a time when SpaceX is reportedly preparing for a public listing later this year.
READ: Tesla invests $2 billion in Elon Musk’s xAI (January 29, 2026)
Ba, who teaches at the University of Toronto, played a key role in shaping research that informed xAI’s Grok 4 models. His departure adds to a growing list of senior exits at the startup.
Other co-founders, including Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy, have also moved on. Last month, Greg Yang said he would scale back his involvement as he focuses on dealing with Lyme disease.
The merger was structured as an all-stock transaction that, according to documents cited by CNBC, valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. Earlier, in March 2025, Musk used xAI in a separate all-stock deal to acquire his social media platform X.
The leadership exits are unfolding even as xAI faces regulatory scrutiny in several regions, including Europe, Asia and the United States.
The investigations were triggered after xAI’s Grok chatbot and image generation tools were found to have enabled the large-scale creation and circulation of non-consensual explicit content, commonly referred to as deepfake porn. The material used images of real individuals, including minors, prompting concern from regulators across multiple jurisdictions.
READ: ‘Remove the top’: Grok AI floods with sexualized images of women (January 3, 2026)
Musk founded xAI in 2023 with a team of 11 others, positioning it as a challenger to OpenAI and Google in the fast-moving AI race. At the time, the company said its mission was to “understand the true nature of the universe,” setting the tone for what Musk envisioned as a transformative venture.
With top names departing, Musk moved quickly to rally employees. On Tuesday night, he convened an all-hands meeting with xAI staff, signaling an effort to reset the narrative and outline a sweeping vision for what comes next.
According to The New York Times, which reported details of the meeting, Musk told staff that xAI would eventually need a manufacturing base on the moon. The goal, he said, would be to build AI-powered satellites there and launch them into space using a massive catapult. “You have to go to the moon,” Musk stated, according to The New York Times.
Musk suggested that such a move would give xAI access to computing capacity far beyond that of its competitors. With that kind of scale, he implied, the company could unlock forms of intelligence that are difficult to conceptualize today. “It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about,” he added, “but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”
Six of the company’s original 12 founders have now exited, five of them within the past year, underscoring the churn at the top. Even as the leadership bench thins, Musk appears determined to shift the focus back to ambition, highlighting a moon-bound trajectory and the prospect of a public listing as he seeks to steady confidence in xAI’s future.