Elon Musk's xAI has lost all 8 of its original co-founders since January- Ross Nordeen is the last to go | Company Business News

The departure of Ross Nordeen, the final member of xAI's founding team, marks the end of an era at one of the world's most valuable AI companies -- and raises fresh questions about stability ahead of a landmark SpaceX IPO. Sourced from Business Insider reporting.

The last of Elon Musk's original co-founding team at xAI has now left the company. Ross Nordeen, one of 11 people who built the artificial intelligence startup alongside Musk from its earliest days, departed on Friday, according to people with knowledge of his exit. His employee badge on X, the social media platform Elon Musk owns, has since been removed.

Nordeen's departure completes a near-total turnover of xAI's founding cohort. Since January, eight co-founders have walked out of the door -- a remarkable rate of attrition at a company that has been valued at around $250 billion and bills itself as a serious challenger in the global AI race.

Nordeen's history with Elon Musk stretches back well before xAI.

Nordeen followed Musk from Tesla, where he served as a technical programme manager on the Autopilot team and played a central role in building out the data centres used to train Tesla's Full Self-Driving system, according to a 2021 organisational chart reviewed by Business Insider. He is also a longstanding friend of Musk's cousin James Musk, as detailed in Walter Isaacson's biography of the billionaire.

Nordeen was among a small group of Tesla and SpaceX engineers who helped Musk execute sweeping staff reductions at Twitter following his takeover of the platform in 2022, a sign of how deep his operational trust ran.

The timing is notable. Most departures began accelerating in the weeks following SpaceX's merger with xAI in February, a deal that preceded what could become one of the most valuable initial public offerings in stock market history.

In February, Elon Musk reorganised xAI and unveiled a new internal structure. In the months that followed, a number of leaders placed in charge of key projects, spanning the company's coding tools to its image generation capabilities, have exited.

Elon Musk's xAI has undergone several further restructurings since and has shed dozens of employees over the past few months. Teams working on Grok Imagine, xAI's video and image generation tool, and Macrohard, its AI agent project, were among those cut earlier this year.

Musk has said xAI is looking at candidates who were previously passed over, and the company has brought on nearly a dozen new hires in recent weeks. Among the most significant additions are Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, two senior leaders from AI coding company Cursor.