Half of the xAI founding team has now left the company
Two co-founders of xAI, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu and Jimmy Ba, announced their departures on consecutive days. Wu posted his announcement on X on Monday night. Ba, who reported directly to Elon Musk, announced his departure on X on Tuesday afternoon.
I resigned from xAI today.
This company – and the family we became – will stay with me forever. I will deeply miss the people, the warrooms, and all those battles we have fought together.
It's time for my next chapter. It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed…
— Yuhuai (Tony) Wu (@Yuhu_ai_) February 10, 2026
These departures bring the total number of founding team members who have left xAI to six out of 12.
Last day at xAI.
xAI's mission is push humanity up the Kardashev tech tree. Grateful to have helped cofound at the start. And enormous thanks to @elonmusk for bringing us together on this incredible journey. So proud of what the xAI team has done and will continue to stay close…
— Jimmy Ba (@jimmybajimmyba) February 11, 2026
Five of these six departures have occurred within the last year.
- Kyle Kosic, infrastructure lead, left for OpenAI in mid-2024.
- Igor Babuschkin departed in August to establish a venture firm.
- Greg Yang, a Microsoft alumnus, left last month citing health issues.
- Christian Szegedy, a Google veteran, departed in February 2025.
xAI’s flagship product, the Grok chatbot, has exhibited unusual behavior. Recent modifications to xAI’s image-generation tools resulted in an increase of deepfake pornography on the platform, leading to legal ramifications.