After the departures, only Manuel Kroiss, known as “Makro,” and Ross Nordeen will remain among the 11 co-founders who helped Musk establish xAI in San Francisco in March 2023.
Last month, Musk criticized the coding team for being late in a public meeting that was posted online. It detailed a reorganization after several other co-founders were ousted, including Greg Yang, Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba.
Toby Pohlen, a former DeepMind researcher, was put in charge of the “Macrohard” project to build digital agents that Musk said could replicate entire software companies. Musk said it was the company’s “most important” push. The name is a “funny” reference to Microsoft, the billionaire added. Pohlen left 16 days later.
Musk has redeployed Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of AI software, to restart the Macrohard effort and review work done previously. Musk said Tesla and xAI would work together to develop a “digital Optimus” that would combine the auto and robot maker’s real-world AI expertise and Grok’s large language models.
Staff complain that the constant upheaval is destroying morale and preventing xAI from reaching its potential.
Musk has built a vast data center in Memphis, Tennessee, with more than 200,000 specialized AI chips, which he plans to expand to 1 million GPUs over time. It also benefits from data provided by its social network X, which merged with xAI last year and now promotes the Grok chatbot.
Employees received a memo denying there would be mass layoffs on Wednesday, the people said. However, researchers continue to resign due to exhaustion from Musk’s “extremely tough” job demands or after receiving better offers from rivals, several people familiar with the departures said.
Layoffs and departures have left xAI with many roles to fill. Recruiters have been contacting candidates not selected in previous interviews and assessments to offer them jobs, often on better financial terms, the people said.
“Many talented people over the past few years have been turned down for an offer or even an interview at xAI. My apologies,” Musk posted Friday morning. He said he would “review the company’s interview history and reach out to promising candidates.”
Musk still has the ability to recruit top talent from Silicon Valley. This week, xAI hired two employees from popular AI coding app Cursor, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, to help improve the “Grok Code Fast” product.
Musk welcomed them in a post on Thursday, adding: “Orbital space centers and mass drives on the Moon will be amazing.”
© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd.. All rights reserved. It must not be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
