Elon Musk’s xAI has lost all 8 of its original co-founders since January- Ross Nordeen is the last to go
The last of Elon Musk’s original founding team at xAI has now left the company. Ross Nordeen, one of 11 people who, along with Musk, founded the artificial intelligence startup from its early days, departed on Friday, according to sources with knowledge of the exit. The employee badge on X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, has since been removed.
Nordeen’s departure completes the near-total turnover of xAI’s founding group. Since January, eight co-founders have walked out the door; That’s a remarkable churn rate for a company valued at nearly $250 billion and which has billed itself as a serious contender in the global AI race.
Who was Nordeen and why was his role important?
In xAI, Nordeen was not a puppet. The 36-year-old Michigan Tech graduate reported directly to Musk, serving as his primary operational lieutenant, coordinating priorities according to people within the organization, directing execution and keeping the company moving through multiple work streams.
Nordeen’s history with Elon Musk predates xAI.
Nordeen followed Musk from Tesla, where he served as a technical program manager on the Autopilot team and played a central role in creating the data centers used to train Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system, according to a 2021 organizational chart reviewed by Business Insider. He is also a longtime friend of Musk’s cousin, James Musk, as detailed in Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire.
Nordeen was among a small group of Tesla and SpaceX engineers who helped Musk carry out sweeping staff reductions at Twitter after he takes over the platform in 2022; It’s a sign of how deep his operational confidence runs.
Eight Co-Founders Left: Who has left xAI since January?
The escape from xAI’s founding team was swift and dramatic. Among those who have left since January is Manuel Kroiss, who led pre-training (the process by which AI models are trained on large data sets) and reported directly to Musk. Kroiss left earlier this week. Also gone were Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu and Greg Yang.
The timing is remarkable. Many of the departures began to accelerate in the weeks following SpaceX’s merger with xAI in February; This comes ahead of what could become one of the most valuable initial public offerings in stock market history.
SpaceX Merger and IPO Preparations Pair with Loss of Leadership
The structural upheaval at XAI comes in parallel with Elon Musk’s preparations for SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO.
In February, Elon Musk reorganized xAI and announced a new internal structure. In the months that followed, a number of leaders responsible for key projects at the company, from coding tools to rendering capabilities, left.
Elon Musk’s xAI has gone through several more restructurings since then, laying off dozens of employees in the past few months. Teams working on xAI’s video and rendering tool Grok Imagine and AI tool project Macrohard were among those cut earlier this year.
Musk Admits xAI ‘Wasn’t Built Correctly the First Time’
Elon Musk hasn’t hesitated to acknowledge the turbulence. “xAI wasn’t built right the first time, so it’s being rebuilt from the ground up,” he said bluntly earlier this month.
Musk said xAI is screening previously overlooked candidates and the company has made nearly a dozen new hires in recent weeks. The most notable additions include Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, two senior leaders at AI coding company Cursor.
xAI Goes After OpenAI and Anthropic Despite $250 Billion Valuation
Despite its massive war chest and headline valuation, xAI faces a real competitive deficit. The company remains one of the best-funded players in the AI industry, but lags behind rivals OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of scale, user reach and product penetration; That’s a challenge its ongoing restructuring must address if it wants to close the distance before the IPO window opens.
Sourced information Business Content reporting.
