Elon Musk has pushed out additional co-founders from xAI as the company's AI coding initiative struggles to gain competitive traction, the Financial Times reported. The latest departures — Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang, the latter reportedly blamed internally for failures in xAI's coding product — bring the total to nine of the original twelve co-founders who have now left. Only Musk, Manuel Kroiss, and Ross Nordeen remain from the founding team that launched in July 2023. Musk publicly acknowledged the severity of the situation, stating that "xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up."
Nine of twelve founders gone. The team that launched the company included Jimmy Ba, co-inventor of the Adam optimizer; Christian Szegedy, inventor of the Inception architecture and Batch Normalization; and Greg Yang, creator of the Tensor Programs framework for hyperparameter transfer. The departures came in waves: Kyle Kosic returned to OpenAI as early as April 2024, Szegedy left for autoformalization startup Morph Labs in February 2025, Igor Babuschkin founded an AI safety-focused VC firm in August 2025 citing concerns about Grok's lack of safety guardrails, and Ba, Yuhuai Wu, and Toby Pohlen all exited within weeks of each other in February 2026. Ba's farewell message — "time to recalibrate my gradient on the big picture" — circulated widely in AI research communities.
Observers and Hacker News commenters point to a recruiting problem that money alone cannot fix. Top frontier AI researchers tend to be philosophically motivated, and Musk's public persona and political positions have become disqualifying for a large share of that community. The researchers who do join tend to be ideological converts or well-compensated pragmatists — a narrower draw than OpenAI or Anthropic, both of which have built research cultures that attract people who would work there regardless of the pay. The Grokpedia side project has drawn particular criticism as an engineering distraction while competitors push their core model capabilities forward.
Whether xAI's access to Twitter/X's real-time data corpus gives it any real edge over rivals' curated datasets is debatable. What is less debatable: OpenAI and Anthropic are both pushing hard into the <a href="/news/2026-03-14-nyt-ai-coding-assistants-end-of-programming-jobs">coding tools market</a> xAI has most visibly failed to crack, and xAI is rebuilding its technical leadership while they do.