Elon Musk is addressing mounting questions inside xAI after a wave of high-profile departures.
Speaking at the company’s all-hands meeting, Musk says the exits are a byproduct of growth, not instability, as the artificial intelligence startup restructures to operate at a larger scale.
xAI Yuhuai “Tony” Wu left earlier this week. Hours later, fellow co-founder Jimmy Ba also departed. Earlier co-founder exits include Kyle Kosic in June 2024, Igor Babuschkin in August 2025, Christian Szegedy in February 2025 and Greg Yang in January 2026.
Musk says the changes reflect the company entering a new phase of development.
“As we grow as a company, a natural thing that happens is you reorganize the company as it scales up. So when you first have a startup, you might have just a few dozen people, and they all just chat amongst themselves. As you grow to several hundred people, you have to then add more structure, just like an organism that grows from a single, like we all just grew from a single cell, and then to a blob of cells, and then you get organ differentiation, limbs, you grow a tail, hopefully the tail disappears. And then you become a baby, you go through these stages.
And so we’re organizing, because we’ve reached a certain scale, we’re organizing the company to be more effective at this scale.”
He acknowledges that scaling a company inevitably changes the type of leadership and skill sets required.
“Now naturally, when this happens, there’s some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages. And so for the people who have departed, I’d just like to say thank you for your contribution. Thank you for getting us this far. And we wish you very well in your future endeavors.”
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