XAI cofounder Jimmy Ba said he left Elon Musk’s startup on Tuesday.
“It’s time to recalibrate my gradient on the big picture. 2026 is gonna be insane and likely the busiest (and most consequential) year for the future of our species,” Ba wrote on X.
Ba reported directly to Musk. He ran a large portion of the company until late last year, when several of his responsibilities were split between two other cofounders, Tony Wu and Guodong Zhang, people with knowledge of the move told Business Insider.
Ba also previously ran the team that oversaw more than a thousand AI tutors, according to an org chart from earlier last year. That role was given to Diego Pasini in September, Business Insider previously reported.
Ba is the second cofounder to depart the company in less than 48 hours. Wu announced he’d resigned from the AI startup on Monday night. Wu’s Slack account was deactivated shortly before the announcement, Business Insider previously reported.
Ahead of Wu’s departure, xAI underwent another restructuring, and several of his responsibilities were shifted under Zhang.
Musk launched the AI company in 2023 with 11 other founders. Six have now left the company — five of them within the last year.
In addition to his work at xAI, Ba is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in the computer science department. He received his Ph.D. from the school while studying under Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the “godfather of AI.”
Musk has said he built xAI as an alternative to what he’s called “woke” chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Over the past year, the company has become known for pushing the envelope. Last July, xAI launched a sexy digital avatar called “Ani,” and its Grok chatbot went on an antisemitic rant.
Most recently, xAI has come under fire after Grok began generating nonconsensual sexual images of real people in response to X user prompts. The backlash eventually prompted the company to restrict Grok’s image-generation features on X.
Last week, Musk announced that xAI would merge with his rocket company, SpaceX. The company is reportedly gearing up for an initial public offering this year that could value SpaceX at $1.5 trillion.
Ba and xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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