Earlier this month, all but two of Elon Musk’s 11 co-founders at his AI startup xAI appeared to have left the company. Now, according to Business Insider, the last remaining co-founders, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, have also departed.
BI reported on Wednesday that Kroiss informed people of his decision to leave xAI, and then reported that Nordeen exited the company on Friday.
Musk recently stated that xAI “was not built right [the] first time around,” so the company is now undergoing a complete rebuild “from the foundations up.” xAI was acquired by Musk’s SpaceX, which now brings SpaceX, xAI, and X (formerly Twitter) under one corporate structure. SpaceX is reportedly planning to go public soon.
Kroiss and Nordeen both reported directly to Musk. Kroiss was in charge of the pretraining team, while Nordeen served as Musk’s “right-hand operator.” Nordeen joined xAI from Tesla and played a role in planning significant layoffs at Twitter following Musk’s acquisition of the platform in 2022.
TechCrunch has contacted xAI for a comment.