The Last Men Standing Have Left Elon Musk’s AI Factory

Elon Musk is officially flying solo at xAI. Reports just confirmed that the final two co-founders of his artificial intelligence startup have walked out the door. Earlier this month, we knew that most of the original 11 co-founders had already moved on. Now, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen have joined the list of departures. This means every single person who helped Musk start this journey is gone. It is a massive shift for a company that was supposed to be the main challenger to giants like OpenAI and Google.

Manuel Kroiss was a heavy hitter who led the pretraining team. That is the group responsible for the very first stages of building an AI’s brain. Ross Nordeen was even closer to the center of power. He was known as Musk’s right-hand operator. Nordeen came over from Tesla and was a key player during the chaotic days when Musk first bought Twitter. He was even one of the main people planning the huge layoffs that gutted the social media platform in 2022. Having both of these guys leave at the same time is a loud signal that things are changing fast behind the scenes.

Musk himself doesn’t seem too bothered by the high turnover. In fact, he recently admitted that xAI was not built right the first time around. He says they are now rebuilding the whole thing from the foundations up. This “Version 2.0” approach matches his usual style of breaking things to fix them. To make this reboot work, he recently moved xAI under the SpaceX umbrella. Now, SpaceX, xAI, and X are all living under one corporate roof. Rumors are swirling that this unified mega-company is preparing to go public, which would be one of the biggest financial events in tech history.

This mass exit raises a lot of questions about what it is like to work at the top level of a Musk company. Building a brand-new AI from scratch is incredibly hard work. It requires long hours, deep focus, and a lot of patience. When the entire founding team leaves within a few years, it usually suggests a clash in vision or a level of burnout that even the most ambitious engineers can’t handle. Musk is famous for demanding “hardcore” work from his staff, and it looks like his original partners have had enough.

Despite the loss of talent, xAI is still moving forward. By joining forces with SpaceX, the startup now has access to some of the best hardware and engineering minds on the planet. Musk wants to use the data from X and the engineering power of SpaceX to create an AI that understands the universe. It is a bold goal, but he will have to do it with an entirely new team. The era of the original 11 founders is over, and the era of the SpaceX-integrated AI has begun.

We will have to wait and see if this complete reset actually works. Musk has a track record of winning against the odds, but losing your entire founding team is a hurdle that would sink most other startups. For now, the focus is on hiring fresh blood and proving that the new foundation is stronger than the old one. If he pulls this off, it will be one of his most impressive pivots yet. If not, it might go down as a very expensive lesson in how not to build a team.