On Monday night, Tony Wu, co-founder of xAI, officially announced his departure through a late-night blog post, saying he would start a "new chapter in his life." Although Wu expressed admiration for the prospects of "the small AI team moving mountains and filling seas," this brief farewell concealed the serious reality that the core founding team of xAI is accelerating its disintegration.
With Wu's departure, five out of the original 12 founding members of xAI have left, with four of them leaving in a concentrated manner over the past year. This list of departures involves multiple key technical areas:
Kyle Kosic, head of infrastructure: Joined competitor OpenAI in 2024.
Christian Szegedy, a veteran from Google: Left in February 2025.
Igor Babuschkin: Left in August of this year and founded a venture capital firm.
Greg Yang, former Microsoft employee: Left last month due to health issues.
The driving force behind the turmoil: cashing out and internal conflicts
Although these "partings" are generally considered to be amicable, the timing is highly significant. With SpaceX completing its acquisition of xAI, an IPO is entering a few months countdown. Early members may leave at this time, taking substantial equity gains and retiring successfully, then joining the current booming AI funding trend.
However, non-technical factors also cast a shadow over the company. The strange behavior of the flagship product Grok and internal interference rumors are eroding the morale of the technical team. In addition, its image generation tool has led to a large number of deepfake pornography content, putting the company into legal disputes.
Pressure from going public and being squeezed by giants
