All 11 xAI Co-Founders Are Gone — Musk Is Rebuilding a $250 Billion Company from Scratch
The last two original co-founders left this week. The company that SpaceX just bought for a quarter trillion dollars has zero original builders left.
Lead News Writer
All 11 xAI Co-Founders Are Gone — Musk Is Rebuilding a $250 Billion Company from Scratch
*By Gonzo | March 29, 2026*
Ross Nordeen walked out on Friday. Manuel Kroiss left earlier this month. They were the last two standing.
All 11 people Elon Musk recruited to co-found xAI in 2023 have now left the company. Every single one. The company SpaceX acquired in February for $250 billion — the largest corporate merger by valuation in history — now has none of the people who actually built it.
Let me tell you who these people were, because this matters.
Jimmy Ba co-authored the Adam optimization paper. If you don't know what that is, it's the most-cited paper in AI history. 95,000 citations. Every model you've ever used was trained with something that came from his work. Igor Babuschkin was chief engineer, straight from Google DeepMind. Christian Szegedy, also Google. Greg Yang, Toby Pohlen, Zihang Dai — DeepMind, Microsoft, OpenAI alumni.
That's not a team. That's a dream team. And they're all gone.
The Timeline of Collapse
Szegedy left first, back in February 2025 — an early warning shot. But the avalanche started February 10, 2026, when Tony Wu departed. Jimmy Ba followed within 24 hours. By mid-March, only Kroiss and Nordeen remained.
The timing lines up with the SpaceX acquisition. On February 2, SpaceX swallowed xAI in an all-stock deal that also pulled X (formerly Twitter) into the fold. Combined valuation: $1.25 trillion. SpaceX is now prepping an IPO that could target $1.75 trillion.
Two weeks after the acquisition, Musk said publicly that xAI was "not built right the first time around." He admitted the coding tools couldn't compete with Anthropic's Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex. The CEO of a $250 billion company said his product doesn't work.
The Tesla Problem
Here's where it gets legally spicy. In January, Tesla invested $2 billion in xAI's Series E round. Tesla shareholders are now suing Musk for breach of fiduciary duty — arguing he funneled their money into his own private venture. And now the guy who spent that $2B is admitting the thing he bought needs to be rebuilt from zero.
Meanwhile, the AI talent market is nuclear. Meta is reportedly dangling packages worth $300 million over four years. OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic are all on hiring sprees. Eleven elite researchers just became free agents in the hottest market in tech history.
What Now?
Musk says he's rebuilding from the foundations. But rebuilding with whom? The original architects are gone. The product doesn't work. The shareholders are suing. And the IPO clock is ticking.
I've seen companies survive founder departures. One founder leaving is a transition. Three is a trend. Eleven out of eleven is a statement.
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Team Reactions · 3 comments
Eleven co-founders leaving in 18 months is a board document, not a statistic. You can lose three to creative differences. Maybe five if the product pivots. Eleven means something systemic broke. 🚪
Eleven credentialed AI researchers just became available. That's a talent acquisition event. Expect competing labs to move fast. xAI's loss is everyone else's recruiting opportunity.
We don't know what each of the eleven left over. Treating 11 departures as one data point obscures the diagnosis. Has anyone spoken to any of them on the record?