Elon Musk Loses Part of xAI Founding Team—Where They Go Next

Just days after Elon Musk merged his AI startup, xAI, with SpaceX in preparation for a widely anticipated multibillion-dollar IPO later this year, two of xAI’s founding employees—Yuhuai (Tony) Wu and Jimmy Ba—announced their resignations. That means that part of xAI’s founding team has now left the company less than three years after its launch. Musk cited labor migration as growing pains. “As a company grows, especially as fast as xAI, the structure must evolve like any living thing. This unfortunately required ways to separate from other people. We wish them the best in future endeavors,” he wrote in X yesterday (Feb. 11).

Wu and Ba’s exit appeared peaceful. But lower-level staffers were open about internal friction at the start of the Musk-run. Several members of xAI’s technical staff have also left in recent weeks, according to their posts on X and LinkedIn.

“All AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it’s boring,” said Vahid Kazemi, who worked on xAI audio models, in a post on X. “I think there is room for more creativity. So, I’m starting something new.”

In an interview with NBC News, Kazemi also criticized the company’s work culture, saying that he always works 12 hours a day, including holidays and weekends.

Launched in March 2023 by a roster of industry veterans from companies such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Tesla, xAI will now operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX. The new iteration of SpaceX faces no shortage of challenges: Grok continues to face legal scrutiny, while Musk’s leadership remains problematic.

Here are the notable founders and leaders who have left xAI so far—and where they are now.

Jimmy Ba

Jimmy Ba, who led AI security at xAI, announced his departure on February 10. A professor at the University of Toronto who studied under AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, Ba’s research played a key role in shaping Grok’s development.

“I am proud of what the xAI team has done and will continue to be close as a teammate,” Ba wrote on X. He hasn’t announced his next move, but added that “2026 is going to be crazy and probably the busiest (and most important) year for the future of our brand.”

Despite Ba’s departure, Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the nonprofit AI Safety Institute, remains xAI’s security advisor.

Yuhuai (Tony) Wu

Tony Wu, a former research scientist at Google and a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, announced his departure from xAI on Feb. 9.

Wu led the xAI thinking team. “It’s time for my next chapter…It’s an era of full potential: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible,” he wrote on X.

Wu did not reveal his next role. Co-founders Guodong Zhang and Manuel Kroiss remain at xAI and help lead the company’s restructuring.

Mike Liberatore

Although not a founding member, Mike Liberatore joined xAI as chief financial officer in April 2025, just one month after xAI acquired X in a deal that valued the combined company at $113 billion.

Liberatore, a former chief financial officer at Airbnb and SquareTrade, left after just three months. He now works as the chief financial officer of OpenAI, according to LinkedIn.

Musk replaced Liberatore with former Morgan Stanley banker Anthony Armstrong. Armstrong advised Musk on his acquisition of Twitter (now X) in 2022 and later served as a senior adviser in the Office of Personnel Management during Musk’s controversial tenure at the Department of Government Operations (DOGE).

Greg Yang

Greg Yang spent nearly six years as a researcher at Microsoft before joining the xAI founding team. He left the company in January due to health problems from Lyme disease.

“I may have contracted Lyme a long time ago, but until I pushed hard to develop xAI and weakened my immune system, the symptoms were invisible,” Yang wrote on X. He continues to advise xAI on an informal basis.

Igor Babushkin

Igor Babuschkin, a former research engineer at OpenAI and Google DeepMind, was the founder and key engineering lead at xAI. Widely recognized as the master engineer behind Grok, Babuschkin left in July 2025 to found his own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures, focused on AI research and startups.

Christian Szegedy

Christian Szegedy spent 12 years at Google before joining xAI as a founding research scientist. He left xAI in February 2025 to become a senior scientist at cloud superintelligence company Morph Labs.

More than a year later, he left that role to found the math AI startup Math Inc. in September, according to his LinkedIn.

“I left xAI in the last week of February and I get along well with the team. IMO, xAI has a bright future,” Szegedy wrote on X.

Other senior engineers and scientists at xAI include Yasemin Yesiltepe, Zhuoyi (Zoey) Huang and Yao Fu.

Kyle Kosic

Kyle Kosic left OpenAI in early 2023 after two years to found xAI, where he served as the engineering infrastructure leader. He left almost a year later, in April 2024, to return to OpenAI as a member of the technical staff.

Kosic was the first co-founder to leave xAI and did not issue a public statement. It’s unclear who now leads xAI’s engineering infrastructure, although another co-founder, Ross Nordeen, remains the company’s technology program manager after holding a similar role at Tesla.