Elon Musk’s xAI loses more co-founders, original team of 12 down to 6 — Why did Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu resign?
Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu are the latest co-founders of Elon Musk’s xAI to leave the company just three years after the AI startup launched.
In individual posts on Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Ba on February 11 and Wu on February 10 said they were leaving the company. The messages themselves were short and did not indicate a harsh response.
But these developments follow a series of exits by other co-founders over the past two years, with the financial crisis and disagreements over direction causing the company’s original team of 12 co-founders to be reduced to six, according to reports.
Why did Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu resign from xAI?
In his early Feb. 11 post, Ba said he was “grateful to help found” xAI, whose mission is to “move humanity up the Kardashev tech tree.” He also thanked Elon Musk for bringing the team together and expressed pride in their work.
In particular, the Kardashev scale, proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, measures the technological progress of a civilization based on the amount of energy it can harness and use.
“I’m proud of what the xAI team has done, and we will continue to remain close as friends of the team. Thank you all for working together. The real treasures here are the people and the friendship,” he said.
In his personal move, Ba said it was “time to readjust my tilt on the big picture,” adding that 2026 “will be a crazy year and probably the busiest (and most important) year for the future of our species.”
Just a day before February 10, Tony Wu also announced his resignation from xAI, calling the company a “family” that “will stay with me forever.”
“I will miss the people, the war rooms, and all the battles we fought together. It’s time for my next chapter. This is a time of all possibilities: a small team armed with artificial intelligence can move mountains and redefine what is possible,” he said.
Wu also thanked Musk “for believing in the mission and taking the ride of his life.”
Both Ba and Wu attended the University of Toronto, and Wu previously worked at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Are there signs of a sinking ship? Is Elon Musk’s xAI in crisis?
It is noteworthy that Ba and Wu are the fifth and sixth members of the founding group to leave the company in the last two years. According to the Bloomberg report, the first to leave was Kyle Kosic in 2024 (just a year after xAI was founded in 2023), followed by Igor Babuschkin and Christian Szegedy in 2025.
In January, co-founder Greg Yang also said he would step back after being diagnosed with Lyme disease.
There have been a number of setbacks for xAI, and The Financial Times reported that Ba’s resignation followed tensions within his technical team over demands to improve AI model performance. The pressure mounted as Musk tried to catch up with Anthropic and OpenAI. The report also added that Ba did not answer questions on this issue.
Another notable xAI engineer, Vahid Kazemi, also shared his resignation from xAI, writing on February 11, “I left xAI a few weeks ago. That was short! IMO, all AI labs build the exact same thing and that’s boring. I guess there’s room for more creativity. So I’m starting something new.”
Two back-to-back exits are also significant because Ba and Wu’s exits occurred after xAI’s merger with SpaceX; It’s a move that values the combined company at $1.25 trillion and could leave the startup facing a funding crunch as it spends cash on data centers, computing and talent, according to Bloomberg.
The departures come as xAI faces multiple regulatory investigations in Asia, Europe, Asia and the United States over its chatbot Grok AI’s image-generating feature that mass creates non-consensual and sexually explicit images of real people, including children, i.e. deepfake porn, according to a report by CNBC.
CNBC added that the company did not immediately respond to questions.
(With input from Bloomberg)
