Elon Musk Remains the Only Original Cofounder Left at xAI

When xAI showed up in 2023, it did not feel like one of those AI startups with a black homepage, a vague mission, and a couple of guys in ‘stealth.’ It felt more like Musk was assembling the Galácticos of AI. DeepMind people. Google people. Microsoft people. Tesla people. Real researchers, real reputations. So xAI looked like the opening scene of a franchise that had already decided it was a blockbuster.

But now that original group looks to be gone. The latest piece of that story is Ross Nordeen. 

Nordeen has left xAI, and that lands harder than a normal exec exit because he had been described as the last remaining original cofounder still at the company besides Musk. A few days before that, Manuel Kroiss was also reported to be leaving. Put those two updates next to the earlier departures, and the shape of it is pretty blunt. The founding bench Musk launched xAI with in 2023 appears to have been cleared out in less than three years.

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That would already be a striking story on its own. But the timing makes it feel less like random churn and more like a company changing form in public. On February 2, xAI said it had joined SpaceX. That deal pulled the AI company deeper into Musk’s orbit and, honestly, made the whole thing look different. Less like a standalone lab with its own center of gravity. More like another unit inside a much bigger Musk structure, where the mission can stay the same on paper while the people and power around it shift fast.

There is also the simple fact that this has been happening in waves. The Nordeen report did not drop out of nowhere. Cofounders have been departing for months, especially since the start of this year. So this is not one dramatic Friday story. It is a pattern. And once a pattern gets this obvious, readers start to look at xAI differently.

That does not mean xAI is finished. It still has Grok, money, access to compute, Musk’s reach, and now the backing of SpaceX. But founding teams are not just names on an announcement post. They usually carry the first version of a company’s brain. Its instincts. Its internal argument about what it is even trying to be. If all of those people are gone already, then the question around xAI is no longer just what it is building. It is whether the company now wearing that name is still the same company at all.