Ross Nordeen, one of the original 11 co-founders of Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI, has left the company this week, Business Insider reports. With Nordean’s departure, none of the original founders remain at xAI.
Nordean reported directly to Musk and was responsible for coordinating and driving the implementation of priorities at xAI. He joined Musk from Tesla, where he worked on building data centers for full self-driving systems, to co-found xAI.
He was also a close ally of Musk’s cousin, James Musk, and played a role in coordinating major layoffs at Twitter following its 2022 acquisition.
Business Insider notes that Nordean’s X badge, which identified him as an XAI employee, has already been removed. His exit coincided with the departure of Manuel Croix, who led pretraining and also reported directly to Musk.
Since January, eight other xAI co-founders have left the company, including Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Bae, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang. All of the original co-founders came from AI and deep machine learning backgrounds. These departures, along with the company’s numerous restructurings, have led to the loss of dozens of employees in recent months.
Despite these departures, xAI continues to recruit talent. In March, the company was reported to be looking for bankers and finance experts to train its chatbot Grok on the financial markets.
However, xAI still lags behind rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of ecosystem and scale. Grok is closely linked to X, relying primarily on information and behavior patterns from social media platforms.
Musk recently acknowledged the company’s challenges, saying that “XAI wasn’t built right the first time, so (it) is being rebuilt from the foundation up.”
