The two co-founders left xAI in two days

“It’s time for me to adjust my perspective on the AI ​​panorama,” Jimmy Ba wrote on X on February 10. “2026 is going to be a crazy year, potentially the busiest and most important for the future of humanity.”

Ba was a student of Geoffrey Hinton – one of the founders of modern artificial intelligence – while studying at the University of Toronto (Canada). He holds an important role at xAI and reports directly to Elon Musk. While at xAI, he was in charge of running the company most of the time until the end of last year, before handing over to the other two co-founders, Tony Wu and Guodong Zhang.

According to xAI’s organizational chart, Business Insider In early 2025, Ba used to run a team of more than 1,000 experts and a collaborative data labeling team for the company. However, last September, this task was reassigned to Diego Pasini – who just graduated from high school in 2023.

Previously, on February 9, Mr. Wu also announced his resignation on

Theo TechCrunchimmediately after the announcement, xAI’s internal Slack channel immediately disabled Wu’s account. Before leaving, xAI went through a restructuring, his role was transferred to Guodong Zhang.

Musk founded xAI on July 12, 2023, with 12 subordinate directors who are experts in the field of artificial intelligence, having worked for Google, Microsoft and Tesla. However, in less than three years, half left, such as Kyle Kosic joining OpenAI in mid-2024, Christian Szegedy quit in February 2025, then Igor Babuschkin resigned in August of the same year to start a venture capital company. Last month, Greg Yang also resigned due to health reasons.

Bloomberg assessment, recent turmoil within xAI may be related to Musk’s strategy, making the co-founders unhappy. Most recently, the billionaire merged this company into SpaceX, with the goal of building a data center in space.