Last of xAI's co-founders leaves the company — of 11, only Musk remains

The last of the eleven xAI co-founders has left Elon Musk's company, TechCrunch reports, citing sources close to the startup. The team that, a little over two years ago, launched the new AI lab alongside Musk has fully dissolved.

xAI was founded in July 2023 as a direct response to the dominance of ChatGPT and OpenAI, a company whose board Musk left back in 2018. The eleven co-founders included researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other leading AI labs: Igor Babuschkin, Greg Yang, Kyle Kosic, Christian Szegedy, Manuel Kroiss, Jimmy Ba, Yuhuai Wu and others. Musk positioned xAI as a lab building truly understanding artificial intelligence, as opposed to what he called the politically biased approach of its competitors.

The first departures came as early as 2024. Igor Babuschkin, one of the key technical co-founders, who came from Google DeepMind, left the company a few months after launch. Others followed. According to TechCrunch, by the start of this week only two of the eleven co-founders were still at the company. Now the last one has gone too. The name of the departing co-founder has not been officially disclosed.

Notably, xAI showed rapid technical progress despite this staff turbulence. Grok 1.5 and Grok 2 came out in 2024, and Grok 3, which beat competitors on a number of benchmarks, arrived in early 2025. The company launched the Colossus supercomputer cluster in Memphis, with 200,000 GPUs in the first phase and plans to double that. The latest funding round, $6 billion, valued xAI at roughly $50 billion. In parallel, xAI completed its merger with Twitter/X, which significantly changed the internal structure of both organizations.

The complete breakup of a co-founding team is not unusual for ambitious AI startups run by a strong leader. At OpenAI a similar process took several years: Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman and Greg Brockman were key names who left the company in 2023–2024. Anthropic effectively grew out of a mass exodus from OpenAI in 2021. xAI is repeating the pattern at accelerated speed: two years, and the founding team has been replaced entirely.

The reasons are usually predictable: differences over strategy, competition for influence over decisions, and pace of work. Musk has repeatedly said xAI must move faster than any competitor. Few people can sustain that tempo for years, especially when the CEO is also running Tesla, SpaceX, X, Neuralink, The Boring Company and DOGE.

For the industry, the departure of the last co-founder is a signal: xAI has finally turned from a collective project into the personal AI company of one man. That simplifies decision-making, but it also concentrates risk on a person with one of the busiest schedules on the planet.