And then there were none: Musk’s last xAI cofounder is out

The last of Elon Musk’s original team of xAI cofounders has cleared out.

Ross Nordeen, one of the 11 who helped build the company alongside Elon Musk, left the company on Friday, according to people with knowledge of his departure. Nordeen has also lost the badge on X that identifies him as an xAI employee.

His exit comes as Musk reorganizes xAI and preps for a blockbuster initial public offering of his rocket company SpaceX, which acquired the artificial intelligence startup in February.

The 36-year-old Nordeen reported directly to Musk at xAI and served as his right-hand operator, coordinating priorities and driving execution across the company, insiders said.

Nordeen, a Michigan Tech grad, followed Musk from Tesla to cofound the AI startup in 2023. At Tesla, Nordeen was a technical program manager on the Autopilot team and worked on building out data centers to train Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system, according to a 2021 organizational chart viewed by Business Insider.

Nordeen is a longtime friend of Musk’s cousin, James Musk, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire. Nordeen was also one of a few dozen Tesla and SpaceX engineers who helped Musk coordinate large-scale cuts at Twitter after he took over the company in 2022.

Representatives for xAI and Nordeen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

XAI has lost eight cofounders since January, including Manuel Kroiss, Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang. Kroiss, who led pretraining, which helps train the company’s AI models on large datasets and reported directly to Musk, left earlier this week.

Most of the departures began shortly after SpaceX’s merger with xAI ahead of the IPO that could be the most valuable in history.

In February, Musk reorganized xAI and unveiled a new structure. Since then, many of the leaders Musk put in charge of key projects — from the company’s coding tool to image generation — have left the company.

XAI has gone through several restructurings since and has been in flux, shedding dozens of employees over the course of the last few months after the company cut portions of its teams working on its video and image generation tool, Grok Imagine, and Macrohard, its AI agent project earlier this year.

The company is one of the best-funded players in the AI race and has reached a reported valuation of around $250 billion, but it trails behind major players like OpenAI and Anthropic when it comes to scale and reach.

Musk said earlier this month that “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”

He has also said the company is actively recruiting new talent and looking at candidates who were previously passed over. The company has brought on nearly a dozen recruits in the last few weeks, including two senior leaders from AI coding company Cursor, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg.

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