All 11 xAI co-founders are gone as Musk rebuilds from the ground up
What's the deal? All 11 co-founders of Elon MuskDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s AI company xAIDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → have now left. Ross NordeenDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the last to remain, departed on March 28, 2026 — days after Manuel KroissDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, who led pretraining, told people he was also leaving.
The exits complete a sweep that accelerated sharply in early 2026, with six co-founders — including Jimmy BaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Guodong ZhangDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → — departing since January alone.
Nordeen had served as Musk's right-hand operator at xAI, coordinating priorities and driving execution across the company. He followed Musk from Tesla, where he worked on Autopilot data centres, to co-found xAI in 2023.
Why now? The departures coincide with a turbulent period of restructuring. In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock deal valuing xAI at $250 billion — part of a combined entity worth $1.25 trillion, the largest corporate merger by valuation in history. Musk has since said xAI "was not built right first time around" and is being "rebuilt from the foundations up," bringing in staff from Tesla and SpaceX while cutting dozens of existing employees.
The admission landed awkwardly: Tesla had invested $2 billion in xAI in January 2026, and shareholders are suing Musk for breach of fiduciary duty over the move. Weeks later, Musk publicly acknowledged that xAI's coding tools were not competitive with AnthropicDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex.
What could go wrong? The talent loss is severe. The researchers Musk assembled in 2023 were among the most accomplished in AI — Jimmy Ba co-authored the Adam optimisation paper, the most-cited paper in AI history; chief engineer Igor BabuschkinDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → came from Google DeepMind; others brought experience from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.
The AI talent market in 2026 is the most competitive ever, with Meta reportedly offering packages worth up to $300 million over four years to retain top researchers. Rebuilding from scratch without this cohort will be difficult.
The signal: The xAI co-founder exodus is a cautionary tale about what happens when corporate turbulence, product failure, and a charismatic but demanding founder collide. That a company valued at $250 billion has lost its entire founding research team — while its founder admits the product needs to be rebuilt — raises fundamental questions about whether valuation and talent retention can diverge this dramatically in frontier AI, and for how long.
Sources:
Business Insider
TechCrunch
Silicon Republic
The Next Web
The Economic Times
Business Insider
J.V.
