Elon Musk restructures xAI's teams following co-founders' departure

By Carmen Arroyo

  Elon Musk said he restructured xAI, his artificial intelligence startup, following the exit of two of its co-founders earlier this week.

XAI will be organized in four core areas, the billionaire told staff in a meeting on  Wednesday: Grok’s chatbot and voice product; Coding; the Imagine video product; and Macrohard, an AI software company run by digital agents. Musk presented the plan in an all-hands meeting with xAI staffers, which he made public on the social network X.

 

“What matters is velocity and acceleration,” he told employees. “If you are moving faster, you will be the leader.” He also thanked the people who have departed the company.

 

The meeting followed the back-to-back departures of Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu, two of the startup’s co-founders, along with a handful of other staff members who’ve left over the past few days.

 

Aman Madaan, who joined xAI in 2024, is leading the main chatbot and voice division. In the meeting, he noted that xAI is quickly developing its models, spurred on by the success of OpenAI’s voice model. “We had nothing, but in six months we developed it from scratch,” he said.

 

Co-founder Manuel Kroiss will lead the coding team, while Guodong Zhang, another of the co-founders, will be overseeing video generation, while helping with coding. Toby Pohlen, also part of the founding team, will be in charge of Macrohard, a division named as a play on Microsoft Corp.

 

“Most of the AI compute is gonna be understanding real-time video generation,” Musk said. “And we expect to be leaders in that.”

 

They all emphasized that xAI is looking to hire. 

 

Twelve original xAI co-founders, including Musk, launched the company in 2023. Ba and Wu are the fifth and sixth from that group to exit in the past two years. Kyle Kosic left in 2024, followed by Igor Babuschkin and Christian Szegedy in 2025. Greg Yang, another co-founder, said last month that he would step back from his role after being diagnosed with Lyme disease. 

 

The exits follow xAI’s recent merger with SpaceX, a move that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion, Bloomberg reported. That deal could ease a funding crunch for xAI, which has been raising large sums of capital as it burns through cash in its bid to build out data centers, buy expensive computing chips and pay for talent.

 

xAI has a large Colossus data center site in Memphis, Tennessee, and is planning an expansion of the complex. The company has already purchased a third building in the area that will bring its computing capacity to almost 2 gigawatts, Musk said late last year. That expansion, which is technically across state lines in Mississippi, will include an investment north of $20 billion. The new building, which Musk has dubbed Macroharder, will require 10,000 to 20,000 GB300 systems, Musk said in the call.

 

Nikita Bier, who is in charge of X’s product, said that the social network and its adjacent apps, including Grok, have reached about 1 billion users. January was the best month ever in terms of engagement for X, he said. He also noted that new users spend 55 per cent more time a day in the app than they did six months ago. The app “has been rebuilt to be better than ever,” and is now generating $1 billion in annual recurring revenue tied to subscriptions, he said.

 

Musk said the company will launching a new X Chat app for those who only want to use it for messaging. He reiterated that he won’t be adding ads to Grok. X Money, an initiative the social network has been working on for years and that’ll be used to send money within the app, will be available to a limited number of external test users in the coming months, he said. “It’ll be the place where all the money is. It’s going to be a game changer,” Musk said.