All "Lianchuang" employees have resigned, Elon Musk "completely reorganizes" xAI

With the departure of the last co-founder this week, xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk in 2023 with an 11-person team, has completed a thorough round of personnel shakeups.

According to a Saturday report by Business Insider, citing people familiar with the matter, Ross Nordeen left this week, and the certification badge on the X platform that identified him as an xAI employee was also removed. This marks that the AI startup—valued at about $250 billion—has officially entered a rebuilding phase.

At 36, Nordeen reported directly to Musk at xAI, serving as his right-hand man. He coordinated company priorities and drove the execution of various initiatives, making him one of Musk’s core operational pillars inside the company.

Nordeen’s departure happened after xAI and SpaceX completed their merger in February of this year. Earlier this month, Musk publicly said, “xAI was not initially built correctly, so it is rebuilding from the ground up.” This statement provides an official footnote to the large-scale personnel upheaval.

The entire founding team exits; the merger triggers a wave of departures

Since January of this year, xAI has successively lost eight co-founders, including Manuel Kroiss, Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang. Among them, Manuel Kroiss—who handled the pre-training business and reported directly to Musk—left just days before Nordeen’s departure.

Most departures happened before and around the time of the merger between SpaceX and xAI. This merger is seen as an important move in SpaceX’s preparation for an IPO—if the listing plan goes through, it could become one of the largest IPOs in history.

Nordeen has a close history with Musk. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, he is a longtime friend of James Musk, Elon Musk’s cousin. He previously followed Musk from Tesla to help found xAI. While at Tesla, he served as the technical project manager for the Autopilot team and participated in building the data centers used to train fully autonomous driving systems. After Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, Nordeen was also one of dozens of Tesla and SpaceX engineers who helped lead large-scale layoffs.

Multiple rounds of reorganization continue to shake things up; key project leaders leave in succession

Since xAI announced a new architecture in February, it has gone through several rounds of restructuring, and the company as a whole has been in continuous turmoil. Musk previously appointed multiple leaders responsible for key projects, including the heads of the company’s programming tools and image generation business, but they have all since left.

At the same time, the company also cut parts of the teams involved in the video and image generation tool Grok Imagine, as well as Macrohard, the AI agents project. In recent months, the company has lost dozens of employees in total.

On the competitive landscape, although xAI is one of the best-funded players in the AI field, it still lags behind major competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of scale and market coverage.

Musk launches hiring to bring in fresh external talent

Despite ongoing staff losses, Musk says the company is actively recruiting new talent and is re-evaluating candidates it had previously not hired. Reports say that over the past few weeks, xAI has brought in nearly ten new employees, including two senior executives from the AI programming company Cursor—Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg.

Musk characterizes this round of restructuring as a comprehensive overhaul of the company’s underlying architecture. After the entire founding team stepped out, the company—valued at about $250 billion—will meet the next phase of competition with a completely new staffing structure.

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