Monday night, xAI co-founder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced that he would be leaving the company. “It’s time for my next chapter,” Wu wrote in a late-night post of X. “This is a time of full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and change what is possible.”

Less than a day later, on Tuesday afternoon, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who reports directly to Musk, said that he, too, bounced, posting a good note to X on his way out. “Many thanks to @elonmusk for bringing us together on this incredible journey. Very proud of what the xAI team has accomplished and will continue to remain close as friends of the team,” it read in part.

On their own, both are fairly standard technology departure notices — but they’re part of a troubling pattern for the lab. Six members of 12 person founding team of the company now left the company, with five of the departures coming in just last year. Infrastructure lead Kyle Kosic left for OpenAI in mid-2024, followed by Google veteran Christian Szegedy in February 2025. This past August, Igor Babuschkin left to find a venture firmand Microsoft alum Greg Yang left last month, which deals with health issues.

By all accounts, the separations have been amicable, and there are many reasons why, almost three years later, some founders may decide to move on. Elon Musk is a notoriously demanding boss, and with SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI complete and an IPO pending in the coming months, everyone involved has a big windfall. It’s a great time to be fundraising for an AI startup, so it’s only natural for high-level researchers to want to strike out on their own.

There are also not so good reasons that could be the reason. The company’s flagship product, the Grok chatbot, is struggling with unique character and apparent internal tampering — the kind of thing that can easily create friction in the technical team. Then there are recent changes to xAI’s image creation tools which flooded the platform with deep pornographysparking in slow motion but real legal consequences.

Whatever the cause, the cumulative effect is staggering. There is a lot of work left on xAI, and an IPO will bring more scrutiny than the lab has faced before. With Musk already spinning off plans for orbital data centersthe pressure to make good on plans can be intense. The pace of model development is not slow, and if Grok can’t keep up with the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic, the IPO will suffer quickly.

In short, the stakes are high, and xAI needs to retain all the AI ​​talent it can.