Musk responds to the mass exodus of the AI core team: 9 people left in 6 days, high school graduates quickly promoted

In the past week, Elon Musk's AI company xAI experienced a major personnel shake-up.

Half of the 12 co-founders have left, and at least 9 engineers have publicly announced their resignations. Even core executives responsible for reasoning and research safety, Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba, posted farewell messages, sparking a trend on the X platform of "I left xAI."

In response, Musk's reply was very official: the organizational restructuring is a necessary step for xAI's scaling.

However, the wording of the departing employees hinted at deeper issues. Some expressed a desire to achieve big things with small teams, others felt "all AI labs are doing the same thing, it's too boring," and three individuals directly formed a startup together. So the question arises: are these co-founders no longer suitable for xAI, or has xAI's direction encountered problems?

Secrets Hidden in the Timeline

According to The New York Times, a few days ago, Musk provided an explanation at an all-hands meeting.

"Because we have reached a new scaling phase, we are adjusting the organizational structure to operate more efficiently at this scale. In fact, when this situation arises, some people are better suited for the early stages of the company and not as well-suited for the later stages."

In translation, this means that the departing employees are no longer fast enough or compatible with xAI.

A few hours later, he added on X:

"xAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve execution speed. When a company grows rapidly, the organizational structure must evolve like a living organism. Unfortunately, this requires parting ways with some individuals."

Hold on, Musk used the word "unfortunately," but his tone didn't convey much misfortune, and he even directly posted a job offer online: "If you're interested in building an electromagnetic catapult on the moon, join xAI."

And if you look through the current list of departures from xAI, the most notable are the two co-founders. Tony Wu, responsible for the reasoning direction, posted a very artistic farewell message upon leaving: "This is an era full of possibilities; a small team equipped with AI can move mountains and fill seas."

Jimmy Ba is the head of research and security, and his wording is more aggressive: "The recursive self-improvement loop is likely to go live in the next 12 months. It's time to recalibrate my gradients from a macro perspective. 2026 will be very crazy."

There is also a detail worth pondering. Former xAI engineer Roland Gavrilescu left last year to found Nuraline, which focuses on pre-deployment AI agents. As a result, on February 11, he posted again saying he left Nuraline to create something new with others who left xAI.

On the surface, Musk attributes everything to the inevitability of scaling. However, several engineers left alongside the co-founder, indicating that this matter is clearly not that simple. There are a few key dates worth noting.

On February 6, engineer Ayush Jaiswal said, "This is my last week at xAI."

On February 7, former X employee Shayan Salehian left; he was previously responsible for product infrastructure and model post-training at xAI.

On February 9, technician Simon Zhai and co-founder Tony Wu announced their departures one after the other.

On February 10, another co-founder, Jimmy Ba, machine learning PhD Vahid Kazemi, multi-modal project leader Hang Gao, and founding team member of Macrohard Chace Lee collectively said goodbye.

This wave of departures occurred at the most sensitive moment for xAI.

In the past 30 days, Grok Imagine generated 6 billion images and 50 million video segments daily, but it also put xAI under regulatory scrutiny, even affecting the merger with SpaceX. Against this backdrop, the collective departure of co-founders cannot simply be attributed to organizational restructuring.

Additionally, according to a person familiar with xAI's operations, Musk is dissatisfied with the expansion of the data center because the massive investment has not led to a sustainable competitive advantage for the AI models. This frustration has led to a new leadership structure and a wave of personnel purges.

Four New Teams and a High School Student

At the all-hands meeting, Musk announced the four major teams after the reorganization.

The first team is responsible for the Grok chatbot, including voice functionality.

The second team specializes in programming AI models, aiming to compete directly with Anthropic's Claude Code for large enterprise clients.

The third team focuses on image generation, which is Grok Imagine.

The fourth team is the most magical: the Macrohard project.

To be honest, the name Macrohard itself is a jab at Microsoft (Microsoft vs Macrohard, one is Microsoft and the other is "giant hard"). The goal is to "digitally simulate company organizations," allowing AI to accomplish any task that a human capable of using a computer can complete.

The person in charge, Toby Pohlen, said at the meeting: "In the future, there should be rocket engines completely designed by AI." So, can we expect AI to build rockets on its own?

Another interesting personnel arrangement is Diego Pasini. He graduated from high school in 2023, won the xAI hackathon in 2024, and is now in charge of the AI mentor team and Grokipedia. A high school graduate managing projects of this level can only be described as very Musk-like.

The all-hands meeting also revealed some data about X. Musk stated that X now has 600 million monthly active users, and when he acquired it in 2022, the "daily active users who could see ads" on the X platform was 237.8 million. X's product head, Nikita Bier, mentioned that the annual recurring revenue (ARR) for subscriptions has just surpassed $1 billion.

He only mentioned that more services would be added in the coming months, such as X Money banking features and a standalone chat application, stating that "daily active users will far exceed 1 billion." Hmm, another bold prediction.

Is the lunar AI factory serious?

The team restructuring is just an appetizer; what really deserves attention is Musk's lunar plan.

According to a report by The New York Times, Musk stated at the all-hands meeting: "You have to go to the moon." His vision is to build a factory on the moon to produce AI satellites, and then use a massive mass driver to launch the satellites into space. This way, it can achieve stronger computing power and energy support than data centers on Earth.

"It's hard to imagine what kind of intelligence of that scale would think about, but seeing it come to fruition would be extremely exciting."

It sounds very sci-fi, but Musk is serious. He even painted a bigger picture: first, build a "self-sustaining city" on the moon, then go to Mars, and ultimately explore other star systems in search of extraterrestrial life.

Two former SpaceX executives revealed anonymously that the moon has never been a focus for the company. However, in recent months, Musk has been posting frantically about the moon on X, clearly indicating a change in direction The premise of all this is that xAI and SpaceX just announced their merger last week. The post-merger valuation is $1.25 trillion, and SpaceX plans to IPO as early as June. Musk is tying the two companies together to promote the epic project of a "space data center."

Back to the point, xAI now has over 1,000 employees. Although losing a few co-founders won't cause immediate harm, in the talent-scarce and reputation-critical AI sector, this wave of departures is sending a dangerous signal.

At the end of the all-hands meeting, Musk said, "xAI is faster than any company, and no one is even close." While this statement may be true, whether the direction of that speed is correct is something only the remaining co-founders truly understand.

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