Elon Musk’s xAI has lost half of its 12-person founding team. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images Just days after Elon Musk merged his A.I. startup, xAI, with SpaceX in preparation for a widely anticipated trillion-dollar IPO later this year, two of xAI’s founding employees—Yuhuai (Tony) Wu and Jimmy Ba—announced their resignations. That means half of xAI’s founding team has now left the company barely three years after its launch. Musk framed the staff exodus as growing pains. “As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve just like any living organism. This unfortunately required parting ways with some people. We wish them well in future endeavors,” he wrote on X yesterday (Feb. 11). Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Liberatore, formerly a finance executive at Airbnb and SquareTrade, left after only three months. He now works as a business finance officer at OpenAI, according to LinkedIn. Musk replaced Liberatore with ex-Morgan Stanley banker Anthony Armstrong. Armstrong advised Musk on his Twitter (now X) acquisition in 2022 and later served as a senior advisor at the Office of Personnel Management during Musk’s controversial tenure at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Greg Yang Greg Yang spent nearly six years as a researcher at Microsoft before joining xAI’s founding team. He left the company in January due to health complications from Lyme disease. “Likely I contracted Lyme a long time ago, but until I pushed myself hard building xAI and weakened my immune system, the symptoms weren’t noticeable,” Yang wrote on X. He continues to advise xAI in an informal capacity. Igor Babuschkin Igor Babuschkin, a former research engineer at OpenAI and Google DeepMind, was a co-founder and key engineering lead at xAI. Widely known as the primary developer behind Grok, Babuschkin left in July 2025 to start his own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures, focused on A.I. research and startups. Christian Szegedy Christian Szegedy spent 12 years at Google before joining xAI as a founding research scientist. He left xAI in February 2025 to become chief scientist at superintelligence cloud company Morph Labs. More than a year later, he departed that role to found mathematical A.I. startup Math Inc. in September, according to his LinkedIn. “I left xAI in the last week of February and I am on good terms with the team. IMO, xAI has a bright future,” Szegedy wrote on X.