The last of Elon Musk’s original co-founding team at xAI has now left the company. Ross Nordeen, one of 11 people who built the artificial intelligence startup alongside Musk from its earliest days, departed on Friday, according to people with knowledge of his exit. His employee badge on X, the social media platform Elon Musk owns, has since been removed.
Nordeen’s departure completes a near-total turnover of xAI’s founding cohort. Since January, eight co-founders have walked out of the door — a remarkable rate of attrition at a company that has been valued at around $250 billion and bills itself as a serious challenger in the global AI race.
Who Was Nordeen and Why Did His Role Matter?
At xAI, Nordeen was not a figurehead. The 36-year-old Michigan Tech graduate reported directly to Musk and functioned as his primary operational lieutenant — coordinating priorities, driving execution and keeping the company moving across multiple workstreams, according to people inside the organisation.
Nordeen’s history with Elon Musk stretches back well before xAI.
Nordeen followed Musk from Tesla, where he served as a technical programme manager on the Autopilot team and played a central role in building out the data centres used to train Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system, according to a 2021 organisational chart reviewed by Business Insider. He is also a longstanding friend of Musk’s cousin James Musk, as detailed in Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire.
Nordeen was among a small group of Tesla and SpaceX engineers who helped Musk execute sweeping staff reductions at Twitter following his takeover of the platform in 2022, a sign of how deep his operational trust ran.
Eight Co-Founders Gone: Who Has Left xAI Since January?
The exodus from xAI’s founding team has been swift and striking. Among those who have departed since January are Manuel Kroiss, who led pretraining — the process by which AI models are trained on vast datasets — and reported directly to Musk. Kroiss left earlier this week. Also gone are Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu and Greg Yang.
The timing is notable. Most departures began accelerating in the weeks following SpaceX’s merger with xAI in February, a deal that preceded what could become one of the most valuable initial public offerings in stock market history.
SpaceX Merger and IPO Preparations Coincide With Leadership Churn
The structural upheaval at xAI has unfolded in parallel with Elon Musk’s preparations for SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO.
In February, Elon Musk reorganised xAI and unveiled a new internal structure. In the months that followed, a number of leaders placed in charge of key projects, spanning the company’s coding tools to its image generation capabilities, have exited.
Elon Musk’s xAI has undergone several further restructurings since and has shed dozens of employees over the past few months. Teams working on Grok Imagine, xAI’s video and image generation tool, and Macrohard, its AI agent project, were among those cut earlier this year.
Musk Acknowledges xAI Was ‘Not Built Right First Time Around’
Elon Musk has not been shy about acknowledging the turbulence. Earlier this month, he stated plainly that “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”
Musk has said xAI is looking at candidates who were previously passed over, and the company has brought on nearly a dozen new hires in recent weeks. Among the most significant additions are Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, two senior leaders from AI coding company Cursor.
xAI Trails OpenAI and Anthropic Despite $250 Billion Valuation
Despite its enormous war chest and headline valuation, xAI faces a genuine competitive gap. The company remains one of the best-funded players in the AI industry, but trails behind rivals OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of scale, user reach and product penetration, a challenge that its ongoing restructuring will need to address if it is to close the distance before the IPO window opens.
Information sourced from reporting.