Overview
- Co-founders Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang exited this week, leaving only two of xAI’s original founding engineers still at the company.
- Elon Musk acknowledged xAI “was not built right” and said he and head of talent Baris Akis will review past interviews to re-engage promising candidates, apologizing to those previously declined.
- Financial Times reporting, cited by Reuters and others, says SpaceX and Tesla executives audited xAI and dismissed staff over weak results, with employees describing burnout and morale damage.
- Musk said Grok is behind rivals in coding and held an all-hands to catch up, while xAI hired Cursor veterans Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg to bolster its code-generation effort.
- xAI’s reset follows its merger into SpaceX at a reported $1.25 trillion combined valuation and Tesla’s disclosed $2 billion investment, as Grok also faces government investigations over non-consensual imagery.