If you’ve been following the AI race, you know that talent is the most scarce resource in Silicon Valley. But right now, Elon Musk’s xAI seems to be bleeding that resource at an alarming rate. In just the past week, we’ve watched a significant exodus unfold that raises serious questions about the stability of the company behind the Grok chatbot.
The headline numbers are stark: at least nine senior engineers have announced their resignations in a single week. But it’s the names at the top of that list that are really turning heads. Co-founders Jimmy Ba and Yuhuai (Tony) Wu officially announced their departures between February 10 and 11, 2026. With their exits, exactly half of xAI’s original 12-member founding team has now left the building since the company launched in 2023.
What is driving top-tier researchers away from one of the most well-funded AI labs in the world? It appears to be a volatile cocktail of internal culture clashes, controversial firings, and a massive corporate restructuring involving SpaceX.
Why are so many co-founders leaving xAI now?
To understand the gravity of this situation, we have to look at who is leaving. Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu aren’t just rank-and-file engineers; they were part of the “Avengers” style lineup Musk assembled from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Microsoft to, as the mission statement put it, “understand the true nature of the universe.”
Their departure statements were cryptic but telling. Ba noted that it was time to “recalibrate my gradient on the big picture,” hinting at a divergence in vision, while Wu spoke about the power of small teams to “move mountains,” perhaps suggesting xAI had become too cumbersome or bureaucratic.
This isn’t an isolated incident. The company has faced significant churn over the last year. Before this week’s wave of resignations, we saw the exits of co-founders Kyle Kosic in 2024, followed by Christian Szegedy in February 2025, Igor Babuschkin in August 2025, and Greg Yang in January 2026. When you lose 50% of your technical leadership in three years, it suggests systemic issues rather than just individual burnout. Reports from the exiting engineers cite “internal turmoil” and “unrealistic deadlines” as primary drivers for the split.
Is the SpaceX merger causing cultural friction?
A major factor looming over these departures is the recent corporate integration of xAI into SpaceX. Through a stock swap deal, SpaceX acquired xAI, valuing the AI venture at $250 billion while SpaceX itself hit a staggering $1 trillion valuation. On paper, this consolidates Musk’s empire, but culturally, it appears to be like mixing oil and water.
The merger was pitched as a way to leverage shared resources, specifically for a project dubbed “orbital data centers.” The idea is to use SpaceX’s infrastructure to support the immense compute needs of next-gen AI. However, this shift seems to have created friction between the research-focused culture of the original xAI team and the hard-driving, hardware-centric ethos of SpaceX.
For researchers who signed up to build AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), pivoting to support orbital infrastructure or dealing with the operational constraints of a space logistics company might not have been part of the plan. The integration has tethered xAI to SpaceX’s roadmap, potentially sidelining the pure research goals the founding team originally chased.
What sparked the immediate controversy?
While the merger provided the background tension, specific flashpoints this week seem to have triggered the immediate walkouts. The most explosive incident involves the firing of engineer Benjamin De Kraker.
De Kraker was reportedly terminated after tweeting about the unreleased “Grok 3” model. His public statement was chilling for anyone in the industry who values transparency: “I was told to either delete my post… or get fired… It makes me very sad, but was the right thing to do.” This heavy-handed approach to information control likely alienated other engineers who value open scientific discourse.
Simultaneously, xAI is fighting regulatory fires. The European Union and the UK have launched investigations into Grok’s safety guardrails—or lack thereof—specifically concerning the generation of non-consensual deepfake images. For senior engineers, working under the constant cloud of regulatory scrutiny and ethical controversy can be exhausting, especially when coupled with the underperformance of other internal projects, like the “MacroHard” coding assistant.
Looking Ahead
The consolidation of xAI under SpaceX is a double-edged sword that ultimately favors investors over innovators. By tethering xAI to SpaceX ahead of a planned 2026 public listing, Musk has secured the financial future of the AI venture, effectively making it too big to fail. However, the loss of technical soul is palpable; when you swap scientific explorers for deadlines and strict NDAs, you inevitably lose the talent capable of making the next great breakthrough. xAI will survive as a product arm of SpaceX, but its days as a frontier research lab capable of rivaling OpenAI or Anthropic may be over.
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