-1.57% Less than six weeks after the merger between SpaceX and xAI in a deal worth $1.25 trillion, Elon Musk admitted that the artificial intelligence start-up needed to be "rebuilt from the ground up." He announced this via the social network X following a series of departures among the company's co-founders, notably Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang. These exits follow those of Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Toby Pohlen in recent months. Out of the founding members present at the creation of xAI in 2023, only two now remain alongside Musk. This instability comes as SpaceX prepares for a potentially historic IPO. In the recently announced merger, SpaceX was valued at $1 trillion and xAI at $250bn. Meanwhile, the company is recruiting new engineers, including Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg from the start-up Cursor, while simultaneously cutting positions after observing the rapid progress of programming tools developed by OpenAI and Anthropic. Elon Musk also acknowledged that some talented candidates had been overlooked during recruitment and said that he is reviewing old applications to re-establish contact with them. xAI is also facing several controversies related to its chatbot and image generator Grok, which has been accused of allowing the creation of non-consensual sexual images from real photos. Despite these controversies, the company has secured contracts with US government agencies and continues its investments in energy and data infrastructure, particularly around Memphis. Tesla is collaborating closely with xAI by integrating Grok into its vehicles and providing energy storage systems designed to power the company's data centers. © MarketScreener.com - 2026