Almost Every Single Co-Founder Just Quit Elon Musk's AI Company and Nobody Knows Why

Something wild is happening at xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company. Almost every single person who helped him start the company has now walked out the door.

As of this week, all but two of the original eleven co-founders have left xAI. That means nine out of eleven people who were there from day one decided to leave. And nobody is really explaining why.

To put that in perspective, imagine starting a basketball team with your eleven best friends, and then nine of them quit before the season is even over. That is basically what happened here.

The two latest departures are Yuhuai Wu and another senior figure, both of whom were considered key technical minds behind xAI's Grok chatbot. Their exits come at a time when xAI is supposed to be competing head-to-head with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic in one of the most important technology races in history.

Musk has been spreading himself incredibly thin between Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, The Boring Company, and his government work. Some insiders suggest the co-founders grew frustrated with the lack of focus and direction.

Meanwhile, competitors are shipping product after product. Google just launched Gemini 3 Deep Think. Anthropic's Claude keeps getting better. And OpenAI is not slowing down either.

The big question now is whether xAI can keep up in the AI race when most of the brains who built it have already left the building.

As reported by OpenTools.ai and Reuters.

Source: OpenTools.ai