xAI Loses Most Co-Founders as Musk Admits Rebuild

Only two of xAI's original eleven co-founders remain after a wave of departures that included Zihang Dai, Guodong Zhang, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Toby Pohlen - all gone within weeks of each other. Musk publicly acknowledged the company "was not built right the first time" and apologized for turning away talent during earlier hiring. The timing is rough - this comes barely six weeks after the SpaceX-xAI merger valued at $1.25 trillion. xAI has already started hiring from Cursor to shore up its coding tools, which Musk himself said were falling behind Claude Code and Codex. Losing nine of eleven co-founders while simultaneously trying to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI on developer tooling is a structural problem that new hires alone won't fix.