Elon Musk’s xAI loses co-founder Tony Wu in latest senior departure
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Elon Musk’s xAI has lost another founding member.
Tony Wu announced late Monday that he is resigning from the AI startup, becoming the latest co-founder to leave the company. Others, including Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy, also left and Greg Yang Last month, he announced he would step back from his role to focus on his fight against Lyme disease.
“It’s time for my next chapter,” Wu wrote a post About X. “This is an age of all possibilities: A small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what is possible.”
Wu’s departure comes as xAI faces consumer backlash and regulatory investigations in many countries. The company’s Grok AI chatbot and image generator enabled the mass creation and publication of nonconsensual, sexually explicit, deepfake images based on photos of real people, including children.
Tesla’s CEO Musk launched xAI with 11 others in 2023 to compete with rivals like OpenAI. Google. According to its website at the time, the company’s stated goal was to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
Last week, Musk announced that rocket company SpaceX was acquiring xAI ahead of a potentially major IPO. The record-breaking transaction is the largest merger of all time and values SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion, according to documents viewed by CNBC.
Musk previously merged xAI with X in a multibillion-dollar deal he announced last March.
–CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report
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