The last two co-founders of Elon Musk's xAI have departed the company, according to Business Insider reports. Manuel Kroiss, who led the company's pretraining team, told colleagues he was leaving earlier this week, followed by Ross Nordeen on Friday. Nordeen served as Musk's "right-hand operator" and came to xAI from Tesla, where he had previously helped orchestrate mass layoffs at Twitter after Musk's 2022 acquisition.
This completes a stunning management implosion I first covered in March, when 9 of the 11 original co-founders had already fled. At the time, Musk claimed xAI "was not built right [the] first time around" and was being "rebuilt from the foundations up." That rebuilding apparently meant gutting the entire founding team that launched Grok and secured xAI's early position against OpenAI and Anthropic.
The timing coincides with SpaceX's reported acquisition of xAI, consolidating it under Musk's corporate umbrella alongside X (formerly Twitter). This restructuring comes as SpaceX reportedly prepares for a public offering, potentially giving public investors indirect exposure to Musk's chaotic AI ambitions.
For developers betting on xAI's APIs or Grok integration, this leadership vacuum raises serious questions about product roadmap stability. When every single co-founder abandons ship, it's usually not because they're confident in the technical direction. The real question now: can Musk rebuild a competitive AI company from scratch while juggling SpaceX, Tesla, X, and whatever other ventures demand his attention this week?