Key Points Following a spate of co-founder departures and a merger with SpaceX, xAI is rebuilding, Elon Musk said on X. This week, the company announced two hires from coding startup Cursor as xAI tries to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. "Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI," Musk wrote in a social media post. "My apologies." Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025. Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images Less than six weeks after Elon Musk merged SpaceX and xAI in a deal he valued at $1.25 trillion, the world's richest person is acknowledging that his artificial intelligence startup "was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up." Musk took to X, which is now owned by SpaceX, to make the comment after a number of xAI's co-founders recently hit the exits. The most recent came this week, when Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang reportedly left the company. Last month, influential researcher Jimmy Ba announced his departure in a post on X, thanking Musk and writing that he was, "Grateful to have helped cofound at the start." That came after Tony Wu said he was leaving. Toby Pohlen followed them out the door later in February. The xAI exodus, which leaves Musk with only a pair of people who started the company with him in 2023, comes as SpaceX prepares to go public sometime this year in what will likely be a record IPO, should it take place. In merging SpaceX with xAI last month, the reusable rocket company was valued at $1 trillion and the AI part of the business was tagged at $250 billion, according to documents viewed by CNBC. Musk previously used xAI to acquire his social network X, formerly Twitter, in another all-stock transaction announced last March. On Thursday, SpaceX said it hired two programmers from red-hot AI coding startup Cursor, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg. The Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter, that Musk has ordered a round of job cuts after seeing the rapid success of coding tools from generative AI rivals OpenAI and Anthropic. Read more CNBC tech news