12 February 2026 Elon Musk’s AI start-up, xAI, is going through a period of turmoil with several members of the technical team already resigning. The exit of co-founders Jimmy Ba, a co-founder who led research, security and business operations, and Tony Wu, who led the reasoning team mean that five of the 12 original founders have left. In recent weeks, several researchers have also left, further thinning xAI’s already small technical team. Some employees have raised concerns about Musk’s overly high expectations and unreasonable demands. The pressure increased after Musk’s decision to merge xAI with SpaceX, with the aim of creating a giant $1.5 trillion (around €1.3 trillion) entity. This has caused internal turmoil. Public criticism of generating explicit content using xAI’s models, combined with Musk’s high expectations, has added to the pressure. XAI’s coding project, MacroHard, which was intended to compete with tools such as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, has failed to live up to Musk’s ambitious goals.