xAI co-founders Jimmu Ba & Yuhuai Wu joins exodus from Elon Musk’s AI startup

Jimmy Ba is the sixth co-founder of Elon Musk's xAI to leave the company following tensions among the technical team, as the employees demand to improvement in models amid merger of AI startup with rocketmaker SpaceX.

Jimmy Ba, co-founder and leader for research, safety and enterprise efforts in Musk’s AI start-up, confirmed his departure on X, thanking the billionaire and said he would “continue to stay close as a friend of the team”.

"We are heading to an age of 100x productivity with the right tools. Recursive self improvement loops likely go live in the next 12mo. It’s time to recalibrate my gradient on the big picture. 2026 is gonna be insane and likely the busiest (and most consequential) year for the future of our species," Ba wrote on X.


His announcement comes hours after Tony Wu, who led xAI’s reasoning team, became the fifth founder to leave, out of the 12-person group who launched the AI venture in 2023.

"This company - and the family we became - will stay with me forever. I will deeply miss the people, the warrooms, and all those battles we have fought together," Wu said, announcing his resignation on X.

"It's time for my next chapter. It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what's possible," he added.

As per an FT report, more than half a dozen other researchers have also left in recent weeks, taking a toll on the start-up’s small technical team. Musk held a call with staff on Tuesday to discuss changes in its technical leadership, one of the people told FT.

Some staff have complained xAI’s leadership overpromised to Musk on technical developments as they race to catch up to rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic, creating unreasonable demands on them, two sources said.

Musk’s recent announcement to sell xAI, which also owns the social media platform X, to his rocket group SpaceX to create a $1.5 trillion combined group has added to the internal turmoil. This plan reflects the billionaire’s plans to launch a network of data-centre satellites to run advanced AI models from space.

But the xAI-SpaceX combination is also expected to help Musk fund the AI startup's huge demand for capital to obtain chips, electricity and data centres to power its growth.

This comes amid internet backlash with people blaming staff around the use of its models to generate explicit sexual content.

MacroHard, xAI’s agents and coding project in particular competes with powerful tools such as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code. However, the system has fallen short of Musk’s expectations.

Musk has set lofty ambitions for MacroHard. “I’d be surprised if by the end of this year, the digital human emulation has not been solved,” FT reported citing Musk in Dwarkesh Podcast last week. “I guess that’s what we sort of mean by the MacroHard project. Can you do anything that a human with access to a computer could do?”

The company’s slate of AI “companions” — such as its anime character Ani, which can engage in erotic conversations with users — has also not delivered the engagement Musk expected, two people told FT, adding that Musk has been frustrated by the lack of growth in the amount of time users spend with these companions, despite new characters and resources dedicated to the products.

The world’s richest man has meanwhile been reviewing the performance of leadership and restructuring departments at xAI, believing some were underperforming, they said.

As per the report, Manuel Kroiss, co-founder of xAI and former Google DeepMind engineer, has been promoted to help run its coding operations.

The recent exodus from the tech team follow a number of big changes among xAI’s top executives over the past year — including general counsel Robert Keele, X chief executive Linda Yaccarino, chief financial officer Mike Liberatore, and head of product engineering Haofei Wang.

As per reports, Musk has been introducing new financial leadership, naming former Morgan Stanley banker Anthony Armstrong as the chief financial officer in October and appointing Jonathan Shulkin, formerly a partner at xAI investor Valor Equity Partners, as the chief revenue officer.