Co-founders of Elon Musk’s xAI join exodus from start-up’s tech team

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

A sixth co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI is leaving the company following tensions among its technical team over demands to improve its models as the billionaire merges the AI start-up with rocketmaker SpaceX.

Jimmy Ba, who has led research, safety and enterprise efforts for Musk’s AI start-up, confirmed his departure on X after the FT contacted him regarding his planned exit. Ba thanked Musk and said he would “continue to stay close as a friend of the team”.

His move comes after Tony Wu, who led xAI’s reasoning team, on Monday became the fifth founder to leave — out of the 12-person group who launched the company in 2023.

More than half a dozen other researchers have also left in recent weeks, according to social media posts and people familiar with the matter, taking a toll on the start-up’s small technical team.

Musk held a call with staff on Tuesday to discuss changes in its technical leadership, one of the people said.

Some staff have complained xAI’s leadership overpromised to Musk on technical developments as they race to catch up to rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic, creating unreasonable demands on them, two people said.

Musk’s recent move to sell xAI, which owns the social media platform X, to his rocket group SpaceX to create a $1.5tn combined group has added to the internal turmoil.

Staff have faced backlash from the public around the use of its models to generate explicit sexual content and have had to navigate Musk’s relentless demands.

MacroHard, xAI’s agents and coding project in particular, has fallen short of Musk’s expectations. The system competes with powerful tools such as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code.

Musk has set lofty ambitions for MacroHard. “I’d be surprised if by the end of this year, the digital human emulation has not been solved,” he told the Dwarkesh Podcast last week. “I guess that’s what we sort of mean by the MacroHard project. Can you do anything that a human with access to a computer could do?”

The company’s slate of AI “companions” — such as its anime character Ani, which can engage in erotic conversations with users — has also not delivered the engagement Musk expected, two people said.

Musk has been frustrated by the lack of growth in the amount of time users spend with these companions, despite new characters and resources dedicated to the products, they added.

The world’s richest man has meanwhile been reviewing the performance of leadership and restructuring departments at xAI, believing some were underperforming, two people said.

Manuel Kroiss, co-founder of xAI and former Google DeepMind engineer, has been promoted to help run its coding operations, they said.

Musk’s deal to combine SpaceX with the AI start-up, announced last week, reflects the billionaire’s plans to launch a network of data-centre satellites to run advanced AI models from space.

But the combination with SpaceX is also expected to help Musk fund xAI’s huge demand for capital to obtain chips, electricity and data centres to power its growth.

Rolling xAI into the rocket group adds to the pressure on the AI start-up’s staff as Musk intends to take the combined group public as early as June.

This year, xAI’s Grok has come under scrutiny from governments globally after requests for AI-generated non-consensual sexual imagery of women and children flooded the platform. Last summer, xAI made changes to the chatbot after it praised Hitler and made antisemitic posts on X.

At the same time, Musk has been under pressure to generate revenue from the AI business to fund costly infrastructure.

The recent departures from the tech team follow a number of big changes among xAI’s top executives over the past year — including general counsel Robert Keele, chief financial officer Mike Liberatore, and head of product engineering Haofei Wang. X chief executive Linda Yaccarino also departed in July and has not been replaced.

Musk has been introducing new financial leadership, naming former Morgan Stanley banker Anthony Armstrong as the chief financial officer in October and appointing Jonathan Shulkin, formerly a partner at xAI investor Valor Equity Partners, as the chief revenue officer.

Additional reporting by George Hammond and Stephen Morris