{"id":470490,"date":"2026-02-12T16:12:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T16:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/470490\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T16:12:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T16:12:12","slug":"musk-addresses-wave-of-departures-from-xai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/470490\/","title":{"rendered":"Musk addresses wave of departures from xAI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk addressed recent departures of xAI staff members Wednesday on X<\/a>, saying the company was recently \u201creorganized\u201d to \u201cimprove the speed of execution,\u201d which \u201crequired parting ways with some people.\u201d<\/p>\n

This week, two co-founding members of Musk\u2019s xAI announced their departures. Several members of its technical staff also have announced that they would part ways with the company since January.<\/p>\n

xAI co-founder Tony Wu announced his resignation Tuesday on X<\/a>, writing it was \u201ctime for my next chapter.\u201d Hours later, another co-founder, Jimmy Ba, announced that it was his last day<\/a>. Wu\u2019s and Ba\u2019s exits leave only half of xAI\u2019s founding team still at the company after co-founder Greg Yang said he would step back<\/a> in January after he was diagnosed with Lyme disease.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s SpaceX acquired xAI this month<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Several members of xAI\u2019s technical staff also announced that they would no longer be working at the company. In addition to the co-founders who left, at least seven employees announced on X that they would be leaving since the start of the year. xAI did not respond to a request for comment verifying whether the people associated with those accounts had worked for and resigned from the company.<\/p>\n

Vahid Kazemi briefly was a member of xAI\u2019s technical staff, where he worked on multimodal models. He resigned a week before the SpaceX merger was announced and said there were \u201ca lot of reasons for people to leave.\u201d Kazemi announced his departure Tuesday on X<\/a>, writing that \u201call AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it\u2019s boring.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saying he worked around 12 hours a day while he was at the company, Kazemi told NBC News: \u201cI mean, first of all, the working hours are crazy. Essentially, they take all your time, including the holidays and the weekends and everything.\u201d <\/p>\n

He added that the SpaceX merger may have caused people to leave. Kazemi said that the move did not come as a surprise but that he had expected that the company would merge with Tesla. Experts have told NBC News<\/a> that Tesla could be likely to combine with xAI and SpaceX.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people just kind of realized it\u2019s not going to be a high-growth company that they thought it\u2019s going to be,\u201d Kazemi said. \u201cA small AI lab is going to be growing much faster than a trillion-dollar space company.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shayan Salehian, another member of xAI\u2019s technical staff, announced last week that he would be leaving<\/a>, saying he would be starting \u201csomething new.\u201d Salehian had worked with Musk\u2019s companies for over seven years, going from Twitter to X and then xAI, according to his post and his LinkedIn page.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking closely with Elon across X and xAI, I saw what happens when you refuse to accept impossible as an answer,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI learned to embody obsessive attention to detail, maniacal urgency, and to think from first principles.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk addressed recent departures of xAI staff members Wednesday on X, saying the company was recently \u201creorganized\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":470491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-470490","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}