Nordeen wasn't just a figurehead at xAI. He was Musk's main operational lieutenant, responsible for coordinating priorities and driving execution across multiple workstreams. His association with Musk dates back to Tesla, where he was a technical program manager on the Autopilot team and instrumental in building data centers for training Tesla's Full Self-Driving system.

The exodus from xAI's founding team has been rapid and notable. Since January, eight co-founders have departed the company. These include Manuel Kroiss, who led pretraining and reported directly to Musk; Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang. The mass departures began accelerating after SpaceX's merger with xAI in February.

The structural upheaval at xAI has coincided with Musk's preparations for SpaceX's blockbuster initial public offering (IPO). In February, he reorganized xAI and introduced a new internal structure. Since then, several leaders in charge of key projects have exited the company. Despite these changes, Musk has been open about the turbulence at xAI, admitting that "xAI was not built right first time around."

Despite its massive war chest and headline valuation, xAI faces a real competitive gap. The company is still one of the best-funded players in the AI space but falls behind competitors OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of scale, user base, and product reach. This is a challenge that its ongoing restructuring will have to tackle if it hopes to bridge this gap before the IPO window opens.

xAI has lost all its original co-founders