Ross Nordeen, the last of xAI’s 11 original co-founders, left the company this week, according to Business Insider. His departure means every co-founder who helped Elon Musk launch xAI in 2023 has now exited the company, most of them since January 2026.
TechCrunch confirmed that both Nordeen and Manuel Kroiss, who led xAI’s pretraining team, departed this week. The exodus includes Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang, all of whom left between January and mid-March.
What Happened
The departures accelerated after SpaceX acquired xAI in February, consolidating SpaceX, xAI, and X under one corporate umbrella ahead of a SpaceX IPO that could be the most valuable in history.
Musk himself acknowledged the scale of the rebuild. “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” he posted on X on March 13. TechCrunch reported that SpaceX and Tesla executives have been evaluating xAI employees and firing those who don’t meet the bar.
Nordeen, 36, reported directly to Musk and served as his “right-hand operator,” coordinating priorities across the company, according to Business Insider. He came to xAI from Tesla, where he worked on the Autopilot team’s data center buildout and helped coordinate large-scale layoffs at Twitter after Musk’s 2022 acquisition.
The Agent Problem
For the AI agent ecosystem, the timing is significant. xAI’s Macrohard project, an AI agent system designed to emulate human actions in digital environments, has stalled after its lead, co-founder Toby Pohlen, left. Musk subsequently announced a joint Tesla-xAI version of Macrohard that pairs Grok as a “navigator” with a Tesla-developed agent processing real-time screen video, keyboard, and mouse actions.
But the company has also cut portions of its teams working on Grok Imagine (image and video generation) and Macrohard, according to Business Insider. Meanwhile, Musk admitted in an all-hands meeting that xAI’s coding tools were not effectively competing with Claude Code or Codex, the programming assistants from Anthropic and OpenAI respectively. He predicted xAI could catch up by mid-2026.
Fortune reported that nine of the original 11 non-Musk co-founders had already departed by mid-March. The final two have now followed.
Rebuilding With New Talent
xAI is hiring aggressively. Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, two senior leaders from AI coding company Cursor, recently joined, per TechCrunch. Musk also said he is personally reviewing previously rejected job applications.
LinkedIn puts xAI’s headcount at roughly 5,000, compared to 7,500 at OpenAI and 4,700 at Anthropic. The company’s reported valuation sits at around $250 billion following the SpaceX merger, but that number reflects SpaceX’s rocket business more than xAI’s AI capabilities.
Why It Matters for Agent Builders
xAI positioned Grok as a serious agentic platform, with Macrohard as its flagship agent product. The total loss of the founding engineering team, combined with a stalled agent project and admitted coding tool deficiencies, raises direct questions about whether xAI can ship competitive agent tooling in 2026. OpenAI and Anthropic are accelerating their agent strategies with established engineering teams intact. xAI is attempting the same race while replacing every senior technical leader simultaneously.