Musk’s xAI loses second co-founder in two days as Jimmy Ba departs

Elon Musk’s xAI lost its second co-founder in two days.

Influential investigator Jimmy Ba announced his departure on Tuesday. to post He thanked Musk on X and wrote: “Grateful to help co-found the startup.”

Ba’s departure comes just a day after co-founder Tony Wu announced his departure from xAI, which merged with Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX earlier this month. The xAI co-founder’s escape comes as SpaceX prepares to go public this year.

Ba, the University of Toronto professor, was credited for critical research that influenced the company’s Grok version 4 AI models. In addition to Ba and Wu, other co-founders such as Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy also left Musk’s artificial intelligence initiative. Greg Yang Last month, he announced he would step back from his role to focus on his fight against Lyme disease.

The record-breaking, all-stock deal valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion, according to documents viewed by CNBC. Musk had previously used xAI to acquire social network X, formerly known as Twitter, in another stock transaction announced in March 2025.

The departures also come as xAI faces regulatory investigations in several jurisdictions in Europe, Asia and the United States.

The investigations were launched after the company’s Grok AI chatbot and image generator allowed the mass creation and publication of non-consensual, sexually explicit images, colloquially known as deepfake porn. The images were based on photographs of real people, including children.

Musk launched xAI with 11 others in 2023 to compete against OpenAI and Google. According to its website at the time, the company’s stated goal was to “understand the true nature of the universe.”

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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