xAI’s legal chief steps down after whirlwind year

Robert Keele said this week that he has stepped down as xAI’s head of legal after just over a year, saying he wants to spend more time with his children. In his announcement, Keele also acknowledged “daylight between our worldviews” with boss Elon Musk, who hasn’t commented on Keele’s exit.

“I love my two toddlers and I don’t get to see them enough,” Keele wrote, posting the news on both X and LinkedIn. Despite calling his time at the AI startup “incredible” and working with Musk “the adventure of a lifetime,” he said he couldn’t keep “riding two horses at once — the family and the job.”

Keele’s news prompted an outpouring of support on social media from xAI colleagues as well as parents. When he joined xAI in May 2024 as its first legal head, he had just launched his own, very short-lived fractional legal outfit. “Keele Law had a good run (~3 weeks!), but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to run legal at xAI,” he wrote at the time, calling himself “beyond stoked, and insanely lucky.”

Keele arrived just before xAI announced a massive $6 billion Series B funding round in May 2024, backed by heavy hitters like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $24 billion. Soon after, xAI began experiencing rapid growth and, in March of this year, acquired X, Musk’s social media company, in a deal that, said Musk at the time, valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion.

Before his entrepreneurial stint, Keele had been head of legal at autonomous aircraft maker Elroy Air and general counsel at Airbus’s Silicon Valley innovation center.

Taking over is Lily Lim, who, before becoming a lawyer, was a rocket scientist at NASA, working on spacecraft navigation for the project that mapped Venus’s surface. She joined xAI in late 2024 as a privacy and IP specialist after legal stints at numerous firms and companies like ServiceNow.

Keele’s departure fits an ongoing pattern of executive turnover across Musk’s empire. X CEO Linda Yaccarino left last month, and Tesla has lost several top executives recently. Musk — who also has numerous longstanding lieutenants — openly expects employees to work long hours, even if it means sleeping at the office, as happened when he acquired X, formerly Twitter.

Some newer companies appear to have adopted a similar mentality to get ahead of rivals, including AI coding startup Cognition, which is looking to aggressively shrink its team. In fact, its CEO recently told employees in an email that he doesn’t believe in work-life balance.