Elon Musk's xAI loses more co-founders, original team of 12 down to 6 — Why did Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu resign?

Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu are the latest co-founders from Elon Musk’s xAI to leave the company, just three years after the artificial intelligence startup began operations.

In individual posts on Musk's social media platform X, Ba on 11 February and Wu on 10 February said that they were leaving the company. The messages were brief and did not hint at an acrimonious exit.

However, the developments follow a spate of exits by other co-founders over the past two years, which has dwindled the company's original team of 12 co-founders down to six, amid reports of a financial crunch and discord over direction, reports say.

Why did Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu resign from xAI?

In his post, early on 11 February, Ba said he was “grateful to have helped cofound” xAI, whose mission is to “push humanity up the Kardashev tech tree”. He also thanked Elon Musk for bringing the team together and expressed pride in their work.

Notably, proposed in 1964 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, the Kardashev scale measures a civilization's technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing and using.

“So proud of what the xAI team has done and will continue to stay close as a friend of the team. Thank you all for the grind together. The people and camaraderie are the real treasures at this place,” he stated.

On his personal move, Ba said that it's “time to recalibrate my gradient on the big picture”, adding that 2026 “is gonna be insane and likely the busiest (and most consequential) year for the future of our species”.

Just a day earlier, on 10 February, Wu also posted that he had resigned from xAI and called the company a “family” that “will stay with me forever”.

He wrote, “I will deeply miss the people, the war rooms, and all those battles we have fought together. It's time for my next chapter. It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what's possible.”

Wu also thanked Musk for “believing in the mission and for the ride of a lifetime”.

Both Ba and Wu went to the University of Toronto, and Wu previously worked at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, according to Bloomberg.

Signs of a sinking ship? Is Elon Musk's xAI in crisis?

Notably, Ba and Wu are the fifth and sixth from the founding group to resign from the company over the past two years. First to leave was Kyle Kosic in 2024 (just a year after xAI was founded in 2023), followed by Igor Babuschkin and Christian Szegedy in 2025, the Bloomberg report added.

In January, co-founder Greg Yang also said he would take a step back after being diagnosed with Lyme disease.

There has been a series of setbacks for xAI, and The Financial Times reported that Ba's resignation followed tensions within its technical team over demands to improve its AI model performance. The pressure arose as Musk sought to catch up with Anthropic and OpenAI. The report added that Ba did not respond to queries on the same.

Notably, another xAI engineer, Vahid Kazemi, also posted that he has resigned from xAI and on 11 February wrote: “I left xAI a few weeks ago. That was short! IMO, all AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it's boring. I think there's room for more creativity. So, I'm starting something new.”

The two back-to-back exits are also significant as Ba and Wu's exits have come after xAI merged with SpaceX, a move that has valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion and could see the startup face a funding crunch as it burns cash on data centres, computing and talent, as per Bloomberg.

According to CNBC, the departures also come as xAI faces multiple regulatory probes in Asia, Europe, Asia and the US over its chatbot Grok AI's image-generating feature, which mass created non-consensual and explicit images, i.e. deepfake porn, of real people, including children.

The company did not immediately respond to queries, CNBC added.

(With inputs from Bloomberg)