xAI Loses Another Founder: Five of 12 Founding Team Leave Amid IPO Pressure

Co-founder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced his departure from xAI on Monday, joining a string of exits by the company’s 12-person founding team. Five have left since the startup’s formation, with four departing in the past year, including Kyle Kosic to OpenAI in mid-2024, Christian Szegedy in February 2025, Igor Babushkin in August 2025, and Greg Yang citing health reasons in January 2026. The departures follow public controversies involving Grok’s erratic behavior and internal tampering, as well as changes to image-generation tools that led to deepfake pornography flooding the platform and subsequent legal actions. With an IPO pending and SpaceX having acquired xAI, the pressure to deliver on orbital data centers and model innovation is intensifying. If Grok cannot keep pace with offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic, the IPO could be jeopardized.