Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI is experiencing an unprecedented personnel earthquake. According to the latest news, the company's co-founder Manuel Croiss has decided to leave.
This means that among the 11 initial core members who joined Musk three years ago to co-found xAI, only Ross Nodin remains. This year, several prominent AI scientists, including Wu Yuhuai and Jimmy Ba, have left successively, and the near-complete departure of the founding team has raised significant doubts about the company's internal management and technical direction.
Reassigning personnel across departments, Musk personally takes charge
Facing the loss of key talents, Musk did not choose conventional external recruitment but launched an aggressive internal restructuring. He not only took direct responsibility for dozens of employees but also mobilized a large number of engineers from Tesla and SpaceX across departments to provide support.
At the same time, Musk carried out drastic layoffs within the existing team and tried to re-contact candidates who had been rejected in previous interviews to bring in new blood. Musk previously publicly admitted that xAI indeed lags behind its peers in key capabilities such as code generation, and the current frantic adjustments are aimed at achieving a technological breakthrough.
Valuation soaring to $1.5 trillion, SpaceX enters the era of integration
Despite the intense turmoil in the technical team, xAI has shown an unusually enthusiastic performance in the capital market. This series of personnel fluctuations coincided with a critical capital milestone for the company: SpaceX has already completed the merger and acquisition of xAI. Under Musk's grand vision, the merger of the two companies aims to achieve deep collaboration in computing power, data, and aerospace engineering. With SpaceX planning to go public, the combined entity is expected to see its valuation soar to an astonishing $1.5 trillion.
This means that Musk is rapidly transforming xAI from a simple laboratory-style company into a "super brain" deeply integrated into his space and energy empire.
