xAI Loses All 11 Cofounders as Musk Admits Startup Broke

Ross Nordeen walked out of xAI on Friday, the last of eleven cofounders to leave Elon Musk's AI startup since its founding. The company carries a $250 billion valuation and access to one of the largest GPU clusters on Earth. None of that was enough. The exodus accelerated after SpaceX acquired xAI i

Elon Musk said earlier this month that xAI "was not built right first time around." That admission came from a CEO who rarely apologizes and almost never concedes failure in public. It landed as the most honest assessment anyone at xAI had offered in months, because Ross Nordeen walked out on Friday, and he was the eleventh cofounder to leave. Every researcher Musk assembled in 2023 to build his challenger to OpenAI and Anthropic is gone. Eight of them since January alone.

The company carries a $250 billion valuation. None of them stayed.