Two co-founders of Elon Musk’s artificial innotifyigence startup xAI resigned less than 48 hours apart, days after the company was merged into aerospace company SpaceX.
“It’s time to recalibrate my gradient on the large picture. 2026 is gonna be insane and likely the busiest (and most consequential) year for the future of our species,” influential researcher Jimmy Ba wrote on X on Tuesday.
Ba is an assistant professor in the computer science department at the University of Toronto, Canada. He earned his Ph.D. there under Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the “godfather of AI,” according to Business Insider.
At xAI, Ba reported directly to Musk and ran a large portion of the company until late last year, when several of his responsibilities were divided between co-founders Tony Wu and Guodong Zhang.
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Elon Musk attconcludes an investment forum in Washington in November 2025. Photo by AP |
Ba’s departure came just one day after Wu announced his exit from xAI on Monday, less than three years after joining the company.
“It’s time for my next chapter,” Wu declared Monday in a post on X, where he also thanked Musk. “It is an era with full possibilities: a tiny team armed with AIs can relocate mountains and redefine what’s possible.”
He did not declare in the statement what he would be doing next.
Musk founded xAI on July 12, 2023, with 12 senior leaders drawn from companies including Google, Microsoft and Tesla. In under three years, half have left. Besides Ba and Wu, other co-founders, including Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy, have also departed Musk’s AI venture, according to CNBC.
Bloomberg reported that the recent departures may be linked to Musk’s strategic direction, which some co-founders were reportedly dissatisfied with. Most recently, Musk merged xAI into SpaceX as part of a plan to develop data centers in space.
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