Eight xAI Cofounders Gone in Three Months: Inside Musk's Rebuilding Playbook
Ross Nordeen didn't announce he was leaving xAI. He didn't need to. Last week he was abruptly cut off from company systems and disappeared from a sprawling group chat that included Elon Musk and hundreds of other engineers. Later, he posted a photo of a hiking trail with the caption: "Touching some grass." The 36-year-old engineer was the eighth cofounder to exit xAI in under three months—and the last non-Musk cofounder remaining. The company's founding team, such as it was, is now Musk and a revolving door of new hires.
The timing is awkward, if not alarming. SpaceX, which completed its all-stock merger with xAI in February, is racing toward a blockbuster IPO reportedly seeking a valuation north of $1.5 trillion. xAI and Grok are listed as core AI assets in the filing. And yet the people who helped build the company from scratch are departing at a pace that corporate governance experts describe as a serious red flag. "Anytime you see mass departures of the founding leadership team, that is a negative signal," Charles Elson, a corporate governance expert, told Business Insider. "Either you're leaving because you're cashing out—which suggests you think the thing is overpriced—or you're leaving because you don't have faith in the management going forward. Either way, it doesn't look good."
Nordeen's departure was particularly surprising to those who thought he would stay. A longtime friend of Musk's cousin and one of the so-called "three musketeers" who assisted in the Twitter takeover, Nordeen was described by a former colleague as "Musk's handler." The expectation was that he would go down with the ship. Instead, the ship appears to be sailing without its original crew. Former colleagues describe a company that has pivoted from building something new to preparing for a public markets debut—and the culture shift that comes with that.
Musk's public response has been characteristically breezy. He posted that xAI "was not built right first time around" and drew a parallel to his retooling of Tesla nearly two decades ago. In 2008, Musk ousted cofounder Martin Eberhard and rebuilt the company from the ground up, eventually turning a failing EV startup into the world's most valuable car company. It's a playbook he clearly believes he can repeat. But the comparison has limits. Tesla in 2008 faced few serious competitors in the EV market. xAI in 2026 is operating in one of the most aggressively contested spaces in tech, competing against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and others, all of whom are well-funded, all of whom are moving fast.
The rebuild itself is already underway. Tesla and SpaceX engineers are being pulled into xAI as the company races to ship Grok 5 and prepare for an IPO that will demand the kind of financial disclosure that private companies can avoid. Analysts at PitchBook note that the xAI integration creates "a lot of risks" for SpaceX's IPO narrative, pointing to the startup's bleeding burn rate and the distraction of managing a high-profile talent exodus during a critical pre-public window. Whether Musk's Tesla playbook works again—or whether this is the moment the cracks become impossible to paper over—is the key question hanging over one of the most anticipated public offerings in years.