xAI’s last original co-founder leaves company

Ross Nordeen, one of the original 11 co-founders of Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI, has left the company this week, Business Insider reports. With Nordeen’s departure, none of the original founders remain at xAI.

Nordeen reported directly to Musk and was responsible for coordinating priorities and driving execution across xAI. He joined Musk from Tesla, where he worked on building data centres for the Full Self-Driving system, to co-found xAI.

He was also a close associate of Musk’s cousin, James Musk, and played a role in coordinating major layoffs at Twitter following its 2022 takeover.

Business Insider notes that Nordeen’s X badge, which identified him as an xAI employee, has already been removed. His exit comes alongside the departure of Manuel Kroiss, who led pretraining and also reported directly to Musk.

Since January, eight other xAI co-founders have left the company, including Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang. All original co-founders came from AI and deep machine learning backgrounds. These departures, combined with several company restructurings, have led to the loss of dozens of employees in recent months.

Despite these departures, xAI continues to recruit talent. In March, the company was reported to be seeking bankers and finance specialists to train its chatbot Grok on financial markets.

However, xAI still lags behind rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of ecosystem and scale. Grok is closely tied to X, relying primarily on information and behavioural patterns from the social media platform.

Musk recently acknowledged the company’s challenges, stating that “xAI was not built right the first time around, so [it] is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”