All 11 of xAI's co-founders have left, and Musk says it is being "rebuilt from the foundations"

Every one of the 11 co-founders who started xAI alongside Elon Musk has now left the company. The last two remaining, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, have departed as well.

Musk said the company "was not built right the first time around" and that it is now "being rebuilt from the foundations up". The comment followed the complete dissolution of the founding team.

xAI was acquired by SpaceX earlier this year. SpaceXAI now sits as a division of SpaceX working across artificial intelligence and social media. When Musk installed Michael Nicolls at its head this spring, the agenda was explicit: catch up with Anthropic's Claude chatbot.

A wholesale turnover of the founding team, combined with absorption into a space company, marks the end of xAI's standing as an independent AI laboratory.

MHA Analysis

A founding team dispersing is not by itself a sign of crisis; the real signal is the company ceasing to be an independent AI laboratory and becoming a division of a space company. In that structure the research agenda is set by the parent's operational needs rather than by the lab. Musk's phrase about rebuilding from the foundations confirms it: the race is no longer to improve a model but to reconstruct an institution.