xAI co-founder Tony Wu abruptly announced his resignation from the company late Monday night, the latest in a string of senior executives to leave the Grok-maker in recent months.
In a post on social media, Wu expressed warm feelings for his time at xAI, but said it was “time for my next chapter.” The current era is one where “a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible,” he wrote.
The mention of what “a small team” can do could hint at a potential reason for Wu’s departure. xAI reportedly had 1,200 employees as of March 2025, a number that included AI engineers and those focused more on the X social network. That number also included 900 employees that served solely as “AI tutors,” though roughly 500 of those were reportedly laid off in September.
Wu’s departure comes just months after fellow xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin departed the company in August to start his own AI safety-focused venture capital firm. Co-founders Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy also departed the company since its 2023 founding, and co-founder Greg Yang stepped back from the company last month amid complications from chronic Lyme disease.
Other recent high-profile xAI departures include general counsel Robert Keele, communications executives Dave Heinzinger and John Stoll, head of product engineering Haofei Wang, and CFO Mike Liberatore, who left for a role at OpenAI after just 102 days of what he called “120+ hour weeks.”
A different company
Wu leaves a company that is in a very different place than it was when he helped create it in 2023. His departure comes just days after CEO Elon Musk merged xAI with his own SpaceX, a move he says will allow for orbiting data centers and, eventually, “scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!” But some see the move as more of a financial engineering play, combining xAI’s nearly $1 billion a year in losses and SpaceX’s roughly $8 billion in annual profits into a single, more IPO-ready entity.
Musk previously rolled up social media network X (formerly Twitter) into a unified entity with xAI back in March. At the time of the deal, X was valued at $33 billion, 25 percent less than Musk paid for the social network in 2022.
xAI has faced a fresh wave of criticism in recent months over Grok’s willingness to generate sexualized images of minors. That has led to an investigation by California’s attorney general and a police raid of the company’s Paris offices.
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