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All 11 of xAI's Co-Founders Have Now Left the Company

Elon Musk's AI startup xAI no longer has any of its original co-founders on board. Earlier this month, reports emerged that nine of the company's 11 co-founders had already departed. Now, according to Business Insider, the last two, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, have also left. Kroiss told people he was leaving, and Nordeen followed shortly after.

Both were senior figures who reported directly to Musk. Kroiss led xAI's pretraining team, which sits at the core of how the company's Grok models are built. Nordeen served as Musk's right-hand operator at xAI, having previously come over from Tesla and played a role in the mass layoffs at Twitter after Musk acquired the platform in 2022.

The departures come at a particularly turbulent moment for xAI. Musk recently acknowledged publicly that the company was not built right the first time and said it is now being rebuilt from the ground up. Around the same time, xAI was acquired by SpaceX, pulling xAI, SpaceX, and X under one corporate roof as SpaceX reportedly prepares for a public listing.

What this means for Grok and xAI's broader AI ambitions in the near term is unclear. Losing the entire original founding team while simultaneously restructuring and merging with another company is a lot to manage at once. xAI has not commented on the departures.