Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu are the most recent co-founders from Elon Musk’s xAI to go away the corporate, simply three years after the substitute intelligence startup started operations.
In particular person posts on Musk’s social media platform X (previously Twitter), Ba on 11 February and Wu on 10 February stated that they had been leaving the corporate. The messages itself had been transient and didn’t trace at an acrimonious exit.
Nevertheless, the developments comply with a spate of exits from different co-founders over the previous two years, which has dwindled the corporate’s unique workforce of 12 co-founders down to 6, amid experiences of monetary crunch and discord over route, experiences say.
Why did Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu resign from xAI?
In his put up, early on 11 February, Ba stated he was “grateful to have helped cofound” xAI, whose mission is to “push humanity up the Kardashev tech tree”. He additionally thanked Elon Musk for bringing the workforce collectively and expressed delight of their work.
Notably, proposed in 1964 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, the Kardashev scale measures a civilization’s technological development based mostly on the quantity of power it’s able to harnessing and utilizing.
“So happy with what the xAI workforce has carried out and can proceed to remain shut as a good friend of the workforce. Thanks all for the grind collectively. The folks and camaraderie are the actual treasures at this place,” he said.
On his private transfer, Ba stated that it is “time to recalibrate my gradient on the large image” including that 2026 “is gonna be insane and certain the busiest (and most consequential) yr for the way forward for our species”.
Only a day earlier on 10 February, Tony Wu additionally posted that he has resigned from xAI, and known as the corporate a “household” that “will stick with me perpetually”
“I’ll deeply miss the folks, the battle rooms, and all these battles we now have fought collectively. It is time for my subsequent chapter. It’s an period with full prospects: a small workforce armed with AIs can transfer mountains and redefine what’s potential,” he said.
Wu additionally thanked Musk for “believing within the mission and for the trip of a lifetime”.
Each Ba and Wu each went to the College of Toronto, and Wu beforehand labored at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, in response to a report by Bloomberg.
Indicators of a sinking ship? Is Elon Musk’s xAI in disaster?
Notably, Ba and Wu are the fifth and sixth from the founding group to resign from the corporate over the previous two years. First to go away was Kyle Kosic in 2024 (only a yr after xAI was based in 2023), adopted by Igor Babuschkin and Christian Szegedy in 2025, the Bloomberg report added.
In January, co-founder Greg Yang additionally stated he would take a step again after being recognized with Lyme illness.
There was a collection of setbacks for xAI, and The Monetary Occasions reported that Ba’s resignation adopted tensions inside its technical workforce over calls for to enhance its AI mannequin efficiency. The strain arose as Musk sought to meet up with Anthropic and OpenAI. The report added that Ba didn’t reply to queries on the identical.
Notably, one other xAI engineer, Vahid Kazemi additionally posted that he has resigned from xAI and on 11 February wrote: “I left xAI a couple of weeks in the past. That was brief! IMO, all AI labs are constructing the very same factor, and it is boring. I feel there’s room for extra creativity. So, I am beginning one thing new.”
The 2 back-to-back exits are additionally vital as Ba and Wu’s exits have come after xAI merged with SpaceX, a transfer that has valued the mixed firm at $1.25 trillion and will see the startup face funding crunch because it burns money on knowledge centres, computing and expertise, as per Bloomberg.
In accordance with a CNBC report, the departures additionally come as xAI faces a number of regulatory probes in Asia, Europe, Asia and the US over its chatbot Grok AI’s picture producing function which mass created non-consensual and specific photos, i.e. deepfake porn, of actual folks, together with youngsters.
The corporate didn’t instantly reply to queries, CNBC added.
(With inputs from Bloomberg)