xAI’s Last Two Co-Founders Exit as Musk Rebuilds AI Venture Under SpaceX Umbrella

New updates have been reported about xAI.

Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI has lost its final two remaining co-founders, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, completing a broader leadership exodus that reportedly began earlier this month. According to Business Insider, Kroiss, who led xAI’s pretraining team, informed colleagues he is leaving, while Nordeen, described as Musk’s primary operating lieutenant, departed the company on Friday.

These exits come as Musk acknowledges that xAI “was not built right the first time around” and says the company is being rebuilt “from the foundations up,” signaling a de facto reset of its structure, strategy, and technical roadmap. The firm was recently acquired by SpaceX, integrating xAI alongside X under a single corporate umbrella at a time when SpaceX is reportedly preparing for a public listing, which could influence capital access and governance for xAI.

Kroiss’s departure removes the leader responsible for xAI’s core model pretraining efforts, potentially slowing near-term development and requiring a rapid reconstitution of technical leadership. Nordeen’s exit may have operational implications, given his prior role in executing large-scale cost and restructuring programs at Musk’s other companies and his position as a key coordinator reporting directly to Musk.

For executives and investors monitoring xAI, these changes point to heightened execution risk in the short term but also to Musk’s intention to re-architect the business and technology stack to fit within a broader Musk-led ecosystem. The consolidation under SpaceX, combined with xAI’s leadership reset, suggests that future capital allocation, talent deployment, and product integration decisions will likely be made at the group level rather than by xAI as a standalone venture.