NEW YORK — Two co-founders of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba, announced they were leaving the startup within 48 hours in posts on X, thinning the company’s original leadership team as SpaceX finalized a takeover of the lab, Feb. 11, 2026.
Neither Wu nor Ba disclosed why they were departing, but the exits land as xAI faces pressure to improve model performance against rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic while navigating rapid consolidation inside Musk’s broader business empire.
xAI co-founder exits: what we know so far
Wu announced his resignation first. In a Business Insider report, Wu described his departure as “my next chapter” and said “a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.” Ba followed with his own announcement a day later, also thanking Musk in his post.
In a Reuters report on the departures, the news agency said the exits cut xAI’s 12-person founding group in half. Reuters also cited the Financial Times as reporting that Ba’s resignation followed tensions in the technical organization tied to Musk’s push to accelerate improvements to xAI’s models.
That pattern has been building. TechCrunch reported Tuesday that six of xAI’s original 12 co-founders have now left, including infrastructure lead Kyle Kosic in mid-2024, Google veteran Christian Szegedy in February 2025, Igor Babuschkin in August 2025 and Microsoft alum Greg Yang in January, as TechCrunch detailed in its roundup.
xAI and the SpaceX deal: why the timing matters
The resignations come as SpaceX absorbs xAI in one of the biggest private-company tie-ups in U.S. history. The all-stock transaction creates a combined enterprise that Musk has said could eventually list publicly to help finance major bets — including space-based computing infrastructure.
In a separate Reuters report focused on deal mechanics, the outlet said the acquisition was completed last week, valuing xAI at about $250 billion and SpaceX at about $1 trillion. Reuters said the multi-step structure was designed to be tax-efficient for xAI shareholders and to avoid triggering certain debt covenants, and that it is not expected to significantly slow the timing of SpaceX’s anticipated IPO later this year, if at all.
A TechCrunch report on the merger announcement said Musk has framed the tie-up around long-term plans to build space-based data centers, arguing that future AI computing demand will be difficult to satisfy with terrestrial power and cooling alone. The shift also connects xAI’s high-cost AI development cycle more directly to SpaceX’s financing and operations.
What the xAI shake-up could mean next
Leadership turnover is not uncommon in the broader AI boom, where competition for researchers and engineers remains intense. Still, the sequencing of these exits is notable for xAI because the company is simultaneously shipping frequent Grok updates, managing product safety and content risks, and adjusting to life inside SpaceX.
For customers and investors, the next questions are practical rather than philosophical:
Decision clarity: Who owns model training, post-training, product rollout and safety review as responsibilities shift inside xAI?
Execution speed: Can xAI keep its release cadence while key founders depart and teams reorganize?
Integration discipline: How tightly will xAI’s AI roadmap be tied to SpaceX priorities, including satellite infrastructure and compute-heavy projects?
xAI has not publicly indicated that Wu and Ba’s resignations will change product timelines. But founder departures can slow decisions and complicate recruiting at a moment when frontier AI labs are increasingly defined by iteration speed — and by their ability to retain experienced technical leadership.
How xAI got here
The latest exits are easier to understand in the context of how quickly xAI’s scope has expanded since launch. A short timeline shows the pace:
July 2023: Musk unveiled xAI and introduced an early team drawn from major U.S. AI labs, Reuters reported when the company launched.
March 2024: Musk said xAI would open-source its Grok chatbot, a move that positioned the company as both a competitor to and critic of more closed systems, as Reuters reported.
March 2025: Musk said xAI acquired his social media company X in an all-stock deal, expanding xAI’s consumer distribution and data footprint, TechCrunch reported.
Now xAI is part of SpaceX, and two co-founders have exited within days. Whether the turbulence proves to be short-term churn or a deeper sign of strain may depend on what xAI ships next — and whether it can stabilize a leadership bench that investors will scrutinize more closely as SpaceX edges toward a public debut.
