Leadership Shake-up at xAI as Two More Co-founders Depart Following SpaceX Merger

Elon Musk’s xAI loses two more co-founders as influential researchers Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu depart just days after the company’s $1.25 trillion merger with SpaceX.

By: AXL Media

Published: Mar 9, 2026, 12:25 PM EDT

Source: CNBC

The "Toronto Connection" and the Impact on Grok 4

The loss of Jimmy Ba is particularly notable within the AI research community. A professor at the University of Toronto and a protégé of "Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton, Ba was instrumental in developing the architecture for Grok 4, xAI's natively multimodal model. His colleague, Tony Wu, led the reasoning research unit and was a veteran of both Google and OpenAI. Their departures follow those of other key founders, including Igor Babuschkin (who left to start an AI safety fund) and Kyle Kosic (who returned to OpenAI), leaving the remaining leadership team increasingly concentrated under Musk’s direct oversight.

Integration with SpaceX and "Space-Based AI"

The co-founder exodus coincides with the formal closing of the SpaceX-xAI merger on February 2, 2026. This consolidation aims to vertically integrate Musk’s AI ambitions with SpaceX’s orbital infrastructure. Key strategic goals of the combined entity include:

Orbital Data Centers: Launching a massive constellation of satellites to host AI compute in low-earth orbit, powered by near-constant solar energy.

Recursive Self-Improvement: Advancing the Grok 4 model toward autonomous reasoning and physics-based world understanding.