Elon Musk’s xAI is facing significant co-founder exits, with Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang among the latest to depart. Despite these departures, the company is actively hiring new talent as part of a strategic effort to rebuild its team.
Recently, xAI onboarded two senior leaders from AI coding startup Cursor, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, both of whom confirmed their hiring via posts on X (formerly Twitter). Milich and Ginsberg were part of Cursor’s product engineering team, which achieved $2 billion in annualized revenue, and will now report directly to Musk.
Zihang Dai reportedly left xAI last week and has removed the xAI badge from his X profile. Guodong Zhang is expected to exit soon, according to reports from The Information. These departures follow earlier exits of co-founders Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang. As a result, only Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen of the original 11 co-founders remain.
Amid these changes, xAI has announced plans to hire across multiple teams and for a new joint project with Tesla, called “Marcohard.” The company is essentially rebuilding its workforce after layoffs and co-founder departures. Musk also acknowledged past hiring missteps in an X post, stating he and Baris Akis are reviewing interview records to reach out to talented candidates who were previously overlooked. Musk wrote, “Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview. @BarisAkis and I are going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates.”
This approach reflects xAI’s efforts to strengthen its team and realign its talent strategy while navigating the departures of key founding members.
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