The Risk of the Muskiverse's Steady Turnover

Working at an Elon Musk company is rarely a stable gig. Musk is known to be an extremely demanding boss, and when he’s focused on a problem, heads will usually roll, either because he fires people or makes their lives so miserable they quit. That seems to have been the case again this week, with major executives at both xAI and Tesla heading for the exits. 

At xAI, co-founder Tony Wu, who had been leading the startup’s teams working on reasoning, announced his departure early Tuesday. Late Tuesday, a second co-founder, Jimmy Ba, also said he was leaving. For those keeping track, that means half of xAI’s 12-person founding team no longer works at the company. And based on my reporting last week on Musk’s dissatisfaction with xAI’s progress on Grok, I expect Wu and Ba may not be the last senior xAI staffers to exit in the coming weeks.