xAI Has No Co-Founders Left Besides Musk: Ross Nordin Departs

The exodus of the team that launched xAI alongside Elon Musk is complete. On March 28, 2026, Ross Nordin left the startup. He was the last co-founder remaining besides Musk himself, which means the founder is now effectively rebuilding the business alone.

The last co-founder leaves

Ross Nordin was not the public face of xAI but an internal operator, regarded inside the company as Musk's "right hand." He helped set priorities and tracked the execution of decisions. He previously worked at Tesla, where he handled areas related to Autopilot and data centers for training the company's in-house software.

His departure is especially telling because as recently as mid-March 2026 only three members of the founding team remained: Musk, Nordin and Manuel Kroiss. Kroiss left a few days later, followed by Nordin. For xAI this is not an isolated resignation but the final point in a long chain of personnel losses. Since January 2026 the company has lost eight co-founders, and the wave of departures accelerated after an internal audit and a series of layoffs. A change to Nordin's status on X suggests his exit became visible even before any official explanation.

Formally, xAI continues to develop Grok and related products. But in terms of management continuity, the startup has been left without the team that built it from scratch in the summer of 2023.

A restructuring ahead of the IPO

The reason for this reset is not only competition in the AI market but also a larger corporate overhaul. On February 2, 2026, SpaceX officially announced the acquisition of xAI, which had earlier been merged with X. Against this backdrop, Musk launched a harsh reorganization: auditors and managers from SpaceX and Tesla arrived at xAI, layoffs began, and some product teams were cut. Projects hit include Grok Imagine and the AI agent Macrohard.

• On March 14, 2026, Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang left xAI
• In the week before March 29, Manuel Kroiss left the company
• On March 28, 2026, Ross Nordin left, the last co-founder besides Musk
• The SpaceX IPO could take place as early as June 2026, as expected
• With the offering, the company hopes to raise about $75 billion for development

Musk himself acknowledged the problem publicly in mid-March. According to him, xAI was built the wrong way and now has to be redone from the foundations. That explains the scale of the effort: this is no longer about replacing a couple of executives but about rebuilding structure, processes and product priorities entirely. The internal pressure is also clear: Musk openly compares xAI with OpenAI and Anthropic and is unhappy that his company is lagging in the race for models and AI tools.

"xAI was not built the right way the first time, so it is now being

rebuilt from the ground up."

At the same time, xAI is expanding hiring and trying to bring back people it previously passed on. That is a fairly rare signal for a fast-growing startup: companies usually defend past hiring decisions, whereas here the founder effectively admits a mistake and opens a second round of selection. If SpaceX really wants to go public in June 2026 and raise tens of billions of dollars, the stability of the AI division becomes not a side story but part of the investment thesis for the whole combined group.

What it means

The xAI story shows that even projects with enormous capital and access to infrastructure can fall apart at the team level. For the market, it is a signal: in the AI race, GPUs and company valuations are no longer the only things that matter. So does the ability to retain the people who can turn ambition into working products.