Elon Musk addressed recent departures of xAI staff members Wednesday on X, saying the company was recently “reorganized” to “improve the speed of execution,” which “required parting ways with some people.”
This week, two co-founding members of Musk’s xAI announced their departures. Several members of its technical staff also have announced that they would part ways with the company since January.
xAI co-founder Tony Wu announced his resignation Tuesday on X, writing it was “time for my next chapter.” Hours later, another co-founder, Jimmy Ba, announced that it was his last day. Wu’s and Ba’s exits leave only half of xAI’s founding team still at the company after co-founder Greg Yang said he would step back in January after he was diagnosed with Lyme disease.
Musk’s SpaceX acquired xAI this month.
Several members of xAI’s technical staff also announced that they would no longer be working at the company. In addition to the co-founders who left, at least seven employees announced on X that they would be leaving since the start of the year. xAI did not respond to a request for comment verifying whether the people associated with those accounts had worked for and resigned from the company.
Vahid Kazemi briefly was a member of xAI’s technical staff, where he worked on multimodal models. He resigned a week before the SpaceX merger was announced and said there were “a lot of reasons for people to leave.” Kazemi announced his departure Tuesday on X, writing that “all AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it’s boring.”
Saying he worked around 12 hours a day while he was at the company, Kazemi told NBC News: “I mean, first of all, the working hours are crazy. Essentially, they take all your time, including the holidays and the weekends and everything.”
He added that the SpaceX merger may have caused people to leave. Kazemi said that the move did not come as a surprise but that he had expected that the company would merge with Tesla. Experts have told NBC News that Tesla could be likely to combine with xAI and SpaceX.
“A lot of people just kind of realized it’s not going to be a high-growth company that they thought it’s going to be,” Kazemi said. “A small AI lab is going to be growing much faster than a trillion-dollar space company.”
Shayan Salehian, another member of xAI’s technical staff, announced last week that he would be leaving, saying he would be starting “something new.” Salehian had worked with Musk’s companies for over seven years, going from Twitter to X and then xAI, according to his post and his LinkedIn page.
“Working closely with Elon across X and xAI, I saw what happens when you refuse to accept impossible as an answer,” he wrote. “I learned to embody obsessive attention to detail, maniacal urgency, and to think from first principles.”
