NEW YORK — Two co-founders of Elon Musk’s xAI, Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba, said they have resigned in posts published within about 48 hours, intensifying leadership churn just as SpaceX wrapped up its takeover of the AI company, Feb. 11, 2026.
The back-to-back departures leave xAI with six of its original 12 co-founders, according to a Reuters report, and raise fresh questions about stability inside a company racing to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic.
xAI leadership churn accelerates after SpaceX takeover
Wu and Ba did not publicly detail why they are leaving or what they plan to do next. But their announcements arrived at a moment when xAI is under pressure to ship stronger models, police the behavior of its Grok chatbot and reassure investors that the company can scale while moving fast.
TechCrunch, which reviewed the posts, quoted Wu as saying, “It’s time for my next chapter,” and described the move as the latest in an exodus that has now taken half of xAI’s founding team off the roster (TechCrunch’s report).
Ba, a University of Toronto machine learning researcher, struck a similarly upbeat tone in his farewell note but suggested he is stepping back to refocus on broader priorities. Business Insider quoted Ba as writing, “It’s time to recalibrate my gradient on the big picture,” while noting he is the second xAI co-founder to depart in less than two days (Business Insider’s coverage).
Individually, founder exits are not unusual at fast-growing startups. In xAI’s case, the timing is what stands out: The co-founders are departing as the company’s ownership, capital structure and governance shift under SpaceX — and as the combined Musk empire tries to sell a coherent story about rockets, satellites, social media and generative AI under one roof.
What the SpaceX-xAI deal changes
SpaceX’s purchase of xAI was structured as an all-stock transaction that leaves xAI as a wholly owned subsidiary, a setup designed to limit spillover legal exposure while also delivering tax and financing advantages for investors, according to a separate Reuters story on the transaction.
That report said the deal valued xAI at $250 billion and SpaceX at $1 trillion, creating a combined $1.25 trillion company and keeping plans for a SpaceX initial public offering later this year on track. It also described xAI’s expanding set of responsibilities: xAI runs the social media platform X and develops Grok, meaning the SpaceX umbrella now contains both a high-profile AI lab and a global social distribution network.
The strategic pitch, according to an explainer from the Los Angeles Times, goes well beyond a simple consolidation of Musk-owned companies. Musk has floated an ambitious plan to put AI data centers into orbit, potentially involving massive satellite deployments — a proposal experts have questioned on feasibility and timeline grounds (Los Angeles Times analysis).
Against that backdrop, senior departures carry extra weight: They can disrupt product road maps, slow decision-making and complicate retention at precisely the moment the new parent company is asking xAI to move faster — and explain itself more clearly — ahead of an IPO-level spotlight.
How xAI got here
xAI is not an overnight experiment. Musk launched the company in mid-2023, pitching it as a challenger to ChatGPT and assembling a founding team that included researchers with experience at major tech firms, according to Reuters’ July 2023 report on xAI’s debut.
Within months, Musk was publicly previewing the company’s first model releases and tying the effort to X’s subscription ecosystem. Reuters reported in late 2023 that xAI was preparing to release its first AI model to a select group, with Musk describing the product as “the best” in some respects and positioning Grok for broader rollout to Premium+ subscribers (Reuters, November 2023).
Then came a major consolidation move: In March 2025, Reuters reported that xAI acquired X (formerly Twitter) in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, with Musk arguing the combination would unify data, models, computing and distribution (Reuters, March 2025).
Now, with SpaceX in control, the stakes are higher — not only because of the size of the valuation, but also because xAI’s engineering culture and leadership decisions will be judged in a more public, investor-facing way.
What to watch next for xAI
In the near term, the key questions are operational: Who absorbs Wu’s and Ba’s responsibilities, whether further leadership changes are coming, and how quickly xAI can keep improving Grok while tightening guardrails on safety and misuse.
In the medium term, the bigger test is whether the SpaceX-xAI combination can persuade markets that the merger produces real synergies — not just a bigger story — while keeping enough top talent inside xAI to execute under intensifying competition from better-funded and faster-shipping rivals.
