All 11 founders of XAI have left: Musk said "we are fundamentally rebuilding"

All 11 co-founders who were with Elon Musk when he founded XAI have left the company. The last two remaining names, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, also left their posts.

Musk said the structure was "fundamentally rebuilt," noting that the company "wasn't installed correctly the first time." This announcement came after the complete dissolution of the founding staff.

xAI was acquired by SpaceX at the beginning of this year. SpaceXAI is now positioned as a division within SpaceX that works in the fields of artificial intelligence and social media. When Musk appointed Michael Nicolls as head of the company this spring, the agenda was clear: to catch up with Anthropic's Claude chatbot.

The complete change of the founding staff and the transformation of the company into a division of a space company marks the end of XAI's position as an independent artificial intelligence laboratory.

MHA Evaluation

The complete dissolution of the founding staff is not an indication of a crisis by itself; the main signal is that the company has ceased to be an independent artificial intelligence laboratory and turned into a division of a space company. In this structure, it is no longer the laboratory itself that determines the research agenda; rather, it is the operational needs of the parent company. Musk's phrase 'rebuilding from the ground up' also confirms this: the race is no longer about improving the model, but about rebuilding the institution.