xAI's Last Two Co-Founders Exit, Leaving Musk's AI Firm Leaderless

Ross Nordeen, described internally as Elon Musk's "right-hand operator" at xAI, left the company on Friday. With his departure, every co-founder Musk recruited to build the artificial intelligence startup has exited, completing an 11-person leadership exodus that unfolded across roughly six weeks.

Nordeen had joined xAI from Tesla and was involved in planning major layoffs at the company. He and Manuel Kroiss, who led xAI's pretraining team, were the last two co-founders still at the company beyond Musk. Both reported directly to Musk. Kroiss told colleagues earlier in the week he was also leaving. Of the 12 people who co-founded xAI in 2023, Musk alone remains.

The cascade began on February 10, 2026, when Tony Wu, one of xAI's most operationally central co-founders, announced his departure. Jimmy Ba resigned within 24 hours, reportedly amid tensions over demands to improve model performance. Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang followed in the first two weeks of March. Those exits prompted Musk to acknowledge on X that xAI "was not built right the first time around" and that the company "is being rebuilt from the foundations up."

The complete founder departure has unfolded against a backdrop of sweeping corporate consolidation. Musk merged SpaceX, xAI, and X under a single corporate umbrella at a combined valuation of $1.25 trillion, a reorganization that coincided with accelerating staff churn across the AI unit.

For investors, the exits raise immediate questions about management continuity. Kroiss oversaw the pretraining systems fundamental to xAI's Grok models; Nordeen managed executive operations. Their departures leave Musk, simultaneously running Tesla, SpaceX, and X, as the singular connective thread to xAI's founding identity. Reports have suggested xAI may be preparing for a significant capital raise or public market event, circumstances in which a complete founding-team turnover typically draws scrutiny from regulators and market analysts who factor management depth into valuations and filing reviews.

Musk has signaled he is actively rebuilding the talent base. Earlier this month, he said on X that he and a colleague, Baris Akis, were reviewing engineering candidates, an unusual public solicitation for a company that had just completed a trillion-dollar consolidation.

xAI's rivals, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, now have a clear window to recruit engineers who built Grok's foundational systems and to reassess competitive assumptions about xAI's product roadmap. The co-founder exodus echoes the pattern that followed Musk's 2022 acquisition of Twitter, when the platform's senior leadership and roughly 80 percent of its workforce departed within months. Whether xAI's technical infrastructure survives the departure of its architects will be the central question for the company's next chapter.