xAI loses its last co-founders
Business Insider reports Kroiss and Nordeen exit as Musk promises a rebuild, SpaceX acquisition ties AI lab to IPO-bound parent
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Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., during the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026.
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Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen have left xAI, according to Business Insider, meaning Elon Musk’s AI startup has now lost its last remaining co-founders. TechCrunch reports Kroiss led xAI’s pretraining team while Nordeen served as Musk’s “right-hand operator”, with a background in Tesla and a role in planning major layoffs at Twitter after Musk’s 2022 takeover.
The departures land as Musk is publicly rewriting xAI’s origin story. He recently said the company “was not built right [the] first time around” and is now being “rebuilt from the foundations up”. That kind of reset can be energising in a conventional startup; in a company where the brand is also the chief decision-maker, it can read as a warning that prior technical bets, internal processes and even reporting lines are provisional.
xAI’s ownership structure is also shifting. The company was recently acquired by SpaceX, folding xAI, X (formerly Twitter) and SpaceX into a tighter Musk-controlled umbrella at a moment when SpaceX is reportedly preparing for an IPO. That combination creates two competing demands: a founder-driven research lab that can pivot overnight, and a capital-markets story that typically rewards predictability, stable governance and clear separation between regulated public-company risk and experimental side projects.
For senior technical staff, the question is not whether the mission is ambitious, but what exactly they are signing up to deliver. Pretraining is a multi-quarter, capital-intensive commitment whose output is hard to verify from the outside; when strategy changes mid-cycle, the cost is paid in wasted compute, discarded model checkpoints and teams reassembled around new priorities. If the person who can unilaterally change those priorities is also the firm’s principal asset, equity has to compensate not just for startup risk but for organisational volatility.
Other AI labs have tried to reduce that volatility with explicit roadmaps, structured research governance and retention packages that trade upside for stability—policy influence, protected budgets, and clearer boundaries between product, research and deployment. xAI is instead being remade inside a group of companies where Musk has repeatedly used rapid reorganisation as both a management tool and a public signal. That can work for execution-heavy turnarounds; it is a harder fit for a research organisation whose value sits in continuity.
The immediate fact is simple: the people who helped start xAI are no longer there to run its most sensitive work. The rebuild will now be carried out by employees who did not negotiate the company’s original bargain, inside a corporate structure being rearranged in public.