The last remaining cofounder of xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company, has left the company. Citing people familiar with his exit, a report by Business Insider, Ross Nordeen, one of the 11 people who helped Musk launch xAI in 2023, departed the company this week. His badge on X, which identified him as an xAI employee, has also been removed, the report said.Nordeen’s departure marks the end of an era for a company even as it is preparing for what could be one of the most valuable initial public offerings in history. The official reason is not known yet but in Musk’s own words, xAI was not built right the first time.“xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” Musk said earlier this month when the last two of the co-founders were left of the 11.
The man who kept xAI running
The report says that the 36-year-old reported directly to Musk and served as his primary operator. He was responsible for coordinating priorities and driving execution across the entire company, the insiders said. In practice, he was the person who made sure things actually got done.A graduate of Michigan Tech, Nordeen followed Musk from Tesla, where he had been a technical programme manager on the Autopilot team, working on data centres to train Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system. He is also a longtime friend of Musk’s cousin, James Musk, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire.In fact, Nordeen was among the small group of Tesla and SpaceX engineers brought in to help coordinate the job cuts when Musk took over Twitter in 2022.
Exodus started after SpaceX-xAI merger
Nordeen’s exit is the final chapter in a steady exodus that has seen all 11 of xAI’s original cofounders depart since the company was founded.Eight cofounders have left since January alone, including Manuel Kroiss, who led the process of training AI models on large datasets, and reported directly to Musk. Kroiss left earlier the same week as Nordeen. Others who have departed include Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang.The report also said that the departures accelerated following SpaceX’s merger with xAI in February, which was executed ahead of the planned IPO.