All "co-founders" have left; Musk "completely restructures" xAI.

```

With the departure of the last co-founder this week, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI, founded in 2023 with an 11-person team, has undergone a thorough round of personnel cleansing.

According to a Business Insider report on Saturday, sources revealed that Ross Nordeen left this week, and his xAI employee verification badge on the X platform has been removed. This signals that the AI startup, valued at about $250 billion, has officially entered a rebuild phase.

36-year-old Nordeen reported directly to Musk at xAI, serving as his right-hand man, coordinating company priorities and driving execution, being one of Musk's core operational pillars within the company.

Nordeen’s departure occurred after the merger of xAI and SpaceX in February this year. Earlier this month, Musk publicly stated, “xAI was not originally constructed correctly, so it is being rebuilt from the ground up.” This statement served as the official explanation for the large-scale personnel upheaval.

All Co-Founders Leave, Merger Triggers Wave of Departures

Since January this year, xAI has successively lost eight co-founders, including Manuel Kroiss, Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang. Among them, Manuel Kroiss, who was in charge of pre-training operations and reported directly to Musk, left a few days before Nordeen.

Most departures occurred around the merger of SpaceX and xAI. This merger is viewed as a key move for SpaceX in preparing for its IPO—a plan that, once implemented, could become the largest IPO in history.

Nordeen himself has deep ties with Musk. According to Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk, he is a longtime friend of James Musk, Musk's cousin. He previously followed Musk from Tesla to found xAI, where he was the technical project manager of the Autopilot team at Tesla and participated in building the data center used to train the fully autonomous driving system. After Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, Nordeen was also among the dozens of Tesla and SpaceX engineers who helped lead large-scale layoffs.

Continual Shakeups in Multiple Rounds of Restructuring—Key Project Leaders Leave

Since announcing its new structure in February, xAI has undergone several rounds of restructuring and remains in a state of continual turmoil. Musk had previously appointed leaders for key projects, including heads of programming tools and image generation business, all of whom have subsequently departed.

Meanwhile, the company has also cut team members involved in the video and image generation tool Grok Imagine, as well as the AI agent project Macrohard, losing dozens of employees in recent months.

In terms of competition, though xAI is one of the most well-funded players in the AI sector, it still lags behind major competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of scale and market coverage.

Musk Launches Recruitment, Introducing New Blood from Outside

Despite the ongoing staff losses, Musk says the company is actively recruiting new talent and reconsidering candidates previously not hired. According to reports, xAI has introduced nearly ten new employees in recent weeks, including two senior managers, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, from the AI programming company Cursor.

Musk characterizes this restructuring as a comprehensive overhaul of the company's underlying architecture. After the departure of the entire founding team, this company, valued at about $250 billion, will welcome the next phase of competition with an all-new personnel structure.

Risk disclosure and disclaimerMarkets carry risk; investment requires caution. This article does not constitute personal investment advice, nor does it take into account the specific investment goals, financial situation, or needs of individual users. Users should consider whether any opinions, viewpoints or conclusions in this article suit their particular circumstances. Investment is at your own risk. ```