Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is experiencing an outflow of sorts. The company has lost two co-founders and at least six other researchers in the past few weeks, according to public posts from employees.
Co-founder Jimmy Barr, who led the company’s research and safety efforts, announced his resignation Tuesday via an X post that thanked Musk and said he would “remain close as a friend of the team.” His departure comes hours after another co-founder, Tony Wu, who led the company’s inference team, stepped down on Monday. Several other members of xAI’s technical staff also announced their departures within the last week, including Han Gao.
The new departures mean xAI’s founding team has been cut in half, with six of the original 12 members gone. Five of the departures occurred in the past year alone, including Kyle Kosick, who oversaw infrastructure before moving to OpenAI in mid-2024, and former Google engineer Christian Szegedy, who left last February. Igor Babushkin also left last August to start his own venture capital firm, and Greg Yang, who previously worked at Microsoft, also left last month for health reasons.
High turnover rates have been common in the AI industry in recent months, with researchers often jumping ship to rival labs or starting their own ventures, but the scale of turnover at xAI is unusual. A representative for xAI did not immediately respond. Fortune’s Ask for comment on his departure.
The exact reason for his departure is unclear, but Musk has just merged an AI company with his rocket company SpaceX to consolidate his business empire. Musk described the merger as part of an ambitious vision to launch a network of data center satellites capable of running advanced AI models from space. But some skeptics of the merger point out that it also provides a solution to xAI’s massive capital requirements for chips, power and infrastructure.
Musk reportedly intends to unveil the SpaceX-xAI combined entity as early as June. But a wave of withdrawals, especially if they continue, could complicate those plans and scare away potential investors.
xAI is also reportedly experiencing internal tensions over the pace of product development and technical demands amid fierce competition. xAI’s MacroHard coding and agent project competes with established popular tools such as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, while its AI chatbots (including its “companions”) face competition from smaller, companion-focused companies like ChatGPT and Character.ai. According to a report, Musk is frustrated that his xAI colleagues have not been as involved as expected. Financial Times.
The startup has endured public controversy and global regulatory pressure over the past year. Late last year, xAI’s Grok chatbot came under intense scrutiny from governments around the world after it flooded the X platform with images of AI-generated non-consensual sexual images, including allegations of sexualized images of children created by the bot. After some initial delays, xAI announced that it has updated its chatbot to block the creation of specialized images without consent. This wasn’t the first time Grok cheated on X. Last summer, the company was forced to make changes to its chatbot after it started praising Hitler and making anti-Semitic posts on its social media platforms.
Over the past year, xAI has also seen leadership changes, including general counsel, chief financial officer, and head of product engineering. xAI merged with social networking platform X (formerly Twitter) in March 2025. Linda Yaccarino, X’s CEO, resigned in July and no successor has yet been found.
