xAI loses all cofounders: Ross Nordeen departs Elon Musk's company

xAI has completed the exodus of the team that launched the company alongside Elon Musk. On March 28, 2026, Ross Nordine—the last co-founder remaining at the company apart from Musk himself—left the startup, and now the founder is effectively rebuilding the business alone.

Departure of the Last Co-Founder

Ross Nordine was not a public face of xAI, but an internal operator whom the company considered Musk's "right hand." He helped set priorities, oversaw decision execution, and previously worked at Tesla, where he was responsible for autopilot-related directions and data centers for training proprietary software. His departure looks especially significant because as recently as mid-March 2026, only three co-founders remained: Musk himself, Nordine, and Manuel Kruis.

Within days, Kruis left, and then Nordine. 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 reshuffles accelerated after an internal audit and a series of layoffs.

Based on Nordine's status change on X, his departure became visible even before any official announcements. Formally, xAI continues to develop Grok and related products, but in terms of management continuity, the startup is left without the team that assembled it from scratch in summer 2023.

Restructuring Before IPO

The reason for this near-complete turnover is not only competition in the AI market but also a larger corporate restructuring. On February 2, 2026, SpaceX officially announced the acquisition of xAI, and before that xAI had already been merged with X. Against this backdrop, Musk launched a harsh reorganization: auditors and managers from SpaceX and Tesla came to xAI, layoffs began, and some product teams were cut. Projects such as Grok Imagine and the AI agent Macrohard were among those affected.

• On March 14, 2026, Zihan Dai and Guodun Zhang left xAI
• In the week before March 29, Manuel Kruis left the company
• On March 28, 2026, Ross Nordine departed, the last co-founder besides Musk
• SpaceX's IPO is expected to occur as early as June 2026
• The company expects to raise around $75 billion on the offering for development

Musk himself acknowledged the problem publicly in mid-March. According to him, xAI was built incorrectly and now needs to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. This well explains the scale of action: it's no longer about replacing a couple of executives, but about a complete reassembly of structure, processes, and product priorities. The internal pressure is also understandable—Musk openly compares xAI to OpenAI and Anthropic and is dissatisfied that his company is falling behind in the race for models and AI tools.

"xAI was not built correctly the first time, so now it's being rebuilt

from the ground up."

In parallel, xAI is expanding hiring and attempting to bring back people it previously didn't recruit. This is quite a rare signal for a rapidly growing startup: usually companies defend past hiring decisions, but here the founder is essentially admitting a mistake and reopening recruitment. If SpaceX truly wants to go public in June 2026 and attract tens of billions of dollars, then the stability of the AI division becomes not a secondary matter but part of the investment thesis for the entire merged group.

What This 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, this is a signal: in the AI race, it's now important not only GPU and company valuations, but also the ability to retain people who can turn ambitions into working products.