The last two original co-founders of Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI have left the company, TechCrunch AI reports, citing Business Insider. Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, the final holdouts from an original team of 11 co-founders, are both gone. That means xAI now has zero co-founders besides Musk himself.
This isn’t a slow trickle. Earlier this month, reports showed 9 of the 11 co-founders had already departed. Now the cleanup is complete.
🔑 Who left and why it matters
- Manuel Kroiss led xAI’s pretraining team and reported directly to Musk. Pretraining is the core engine behind any large language model. Losing that lead is not a minor personnel change.
- Ross Nordeen was described as Musk’s “right-hand operator.” He came from Tesla and helped plan the massive layoffs at Twitter after Musk’s 2022 acquisition.
Both reported directly to Musk, according to Business Insider.
🏗️ The “rebuild” context
Musk recently said xAI “was not built right the first time around” and is now “being rebuilt from the foundations up.” That’s a striking admission for a company that raised $6 billion in funding and built what it claimed was the world’s most powerful AI training cluster.
When the founder says the company needs rebuilding and every co-founder walks out the door, those two facts are hard to read separately.
🔗 The SpaceX merger changes everything
xAI was recently acquired by SpaceX, folding it together with X (formerly Twitter) under one corporate umbrella. SpaceX is reportedly planning to go public. That restructuring likely accelerated departures. Co-founders who signed up to build an independent AI company now find themselves inside a sprawling Musk conglomerate.
This is significant for the broader AI race. xAI’s Grok models compete directly with OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. A full co-founder exodus during a corporate restructuring signals serious internal turbulence at a moment when stability matters most.
⚡ What to watch next
The key question: who replaces Kroiss on the pretraining team? That role determines the technical direction of Grok’s next generation. If Musk fills the gap with SpaceX or Tesla transfers rather than dedicated AI researchers, it’ll tell you a lot about where xAI is heading.
TechCrunch AI notes they’ve reached out to xAI for comment. More details may surface as the SpaceX IPO preparations move forward.