By Becky Peterson
One by one, the founding team of xAI is leaving the artificial intelligence company as Elon Musk pushes for a complete reorganization.
"Time to recalibrate my gradient on the big picture," one co-founder wrote to announce his last day. "My next priorities: sleep for more than 8h," another wrote on Feb. 26. "Wild journey past three years but excited about next chapter," another posted Friday on X.
The departures are part of bigger changes in recent weeks that have shrunk the original team that helped Musk launch the creator of the Grok chatbot. The shakeup comes just over a month after Musk merged xAI into his rocket company SpaceX in a deal that valued xAI at $250 billion.
In a social media post this week, Musk said xAI "was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up."
Musk has also hired two big names from the competing AI startup Cursor and announced that he would be revisiting all prior applications for jobs at xAI with the help of a partner at the venture capital firm Human Capital. Representatives for xAI and SpaceX didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
It's the second time in less than a month that Musk has announced a reorganization at xAI. In February, just days after the merger, Musk said he restructured the xAI to "improve speed of execution" and emphasized that the company was "hiring aggressively."
xAI is trying to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic, two leaders working on large language models. xAI, whose chatbot Grok is integrated into the X social media platform as well as some Tesla vehicles, has struggled to compete for enterprise clients, particularly when it comes to automating software engineering.
"We're currently behind in coding," Musk said at an industry conference on Wednesday. "I was just in a giant sort of all-hands on coding, going through all the things that need to happen to essentially exceed our competitors on coding, which I think we'll do."
SpaceX is pressing ahead on a summer IPO which could value the company at $2 trillion and raise tens of billions of dollars in capital. The company has pitched the IPO as vital to making good on boundary-pushing projects including colonizing the moon and putting data centers into space.
Musk has also taken steps to more closely integrate xAI with Tesla through a joint venture project called Digital Optimus. Musk said that the project was part of Tesla's $2 billion investment in the company in January.
Write to Becky Peterson at becky.peterson@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 13, 2026 16:07 ET (20:07 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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