It would appear Elon’s playing shell games, burying Twitter’s debt in xAI, and xAI’s problems in SpaceX right before its IPO are not encouraging his founders to stick around and see how it plays out.
Less than six weeks after Elon Musk merged SpaceX and xAI in a deal he valued at $1.25 trillion, the world’s richest person is acknowledging that his artificial intelligence startup “was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”
Musk took to X, which is now owned by SpaceX, to make the comment after a number of xAI’s co-founders recently hit the exits. The most recent came this week, when Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang reportedly left the company.
Last month, influential researcher Jimmy Ba announced his departure in a post on X, thanking Musk and writing that he was, “Grateful to have helped cofound at the start.” That came after Tony Wu said he was leaving. Toby Pohlen followed them out the door later in February.
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The xAI exodus, which leaves Musk with only a pair of people who started the company with him in 2023, comes as SpaceX prepares to go public sometime this year in what will likely be a record IPO, should it take place.
You can shuffle companies, valuations, and stock deals all day long. The one thing you can’t shuffle is the engineers walking out the door.
An Ars Technica article makes it sound as if the most recent founders to leave didn't "walk out the door", but were pushed out of it.
Reading between the lines, I sense some strong "Beatings will continue until morale improves" energy about Musk's micro-management of xAI and perhaps his other companies as well.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/staff-complain-that-xai-is-flailing-because-of-constant-upheaval/
Why would anyone think any company owned by the muskrat is going to pay out?