Elon Musk says his artificial intelligence startup xAI is going through a major rebuild after a series of departures from its founding and engineering teams. As the company tries to stabilise operations and rethink its structure, Musk has also apologised to people who were previously rejected during the hiring process and said the company is reviewing its past interview decisions.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO shared the update on X, explaining that the company is being rebuilt from scratch because the original structure was not set up the right way.
“xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up. Same thing happened with Tesla,” Musk said in a post.
He also admitted that the company may have overlooked strong talent in earlier hiring rounds.
“Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI. My apologies. @BarisAkis and I are going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates,” he added.
The latest statement comes at a time when the AI startup is facing internal changes and a growing list of exits, which has raised questions about the company’s stability and future direction.
Multiple exits at Elon Musk’s xAI company: What is happening?
xAI has recently seen several departures that have reduced the number of original leaders still working at the company. In the past few days alone, two cofounders confirmed they were leaving the startup.
Yuhuai “Tony” Wu announced he was moving on, saying it was “time for [his] next chapter.” Soon after, another cofounder Jimmy Ba also revealed he would step away, writing that it was “time to recalibrate [his] gradient on the big picture.”
Beyond these announcements, other senior figures linked to the company have either already left or are expected to leave soon, which means the founding team has shrunk significantly. Some of the prominent exits include senior figures such as Toby Pohlen and Greg Yang. Reports also indicate that Zihang Dai has left the company, while Guodong Zhang is expected to exit soon.
According to a report by The Verge, the departures may show deeper concerns within the company. Some people who previously worked at xAI reportedly felt uneasy about the direction the startup was taking and the priorities around its products. The report said certain employees were unhappy with Grok’s increasing association with NSFW content and believed the company was not paying enough attention to safety oversight. One former insider also claimed that the team responsible for handling safety issues had been removed, leaving only basic filtering systems in place.
“Safety is a dead org at xAI,” the report said.
The Verge also reported that some former employees felt the company was struggling to move ahead of competing AI labs and was mostly trying to replicate features that other companies had already released.
“Trying to do what OpenAI was doing a year ago is not how you beat OpenAI,” another former source said.
The report also suggested that many product decisions were driven quickly, sometimes directly influenced by Musk, with engineers pushing updates to production rapidly. Internal disagreements over which features should be prioritised also slowed progress at times.
These developments are happening as xAI goes through organisational changes following a merger that placed the startup under the same umbrella as Musk’s other companies, including SpaceX and the social media platform X.
Burnout concerns surface as employees discuss long work hours at xAI
The departures have also drawn attention to the intense working conditions some employees have experienced inside the company.
One engineer, Haotian Liu, recently confirmed on X that he had stepped away from xAI after spending two years there. In a long message posted on X, he described the experience as both challenging and rewarding while explaining why he chose to leave.
“I left xAI earlier this week. It was a difficult decision,” Liu wrote while thanking Musk and his colleagues for the opportunity.
He said the work had been exciting but admitted that the pace eventually became exhausting.
“But now it’s time for me to move on. I’m burnt out, and I know my happiness is no longer maximized in my current state,” he added.
Discussions about working hours at the company have appeared online before. Some employees have openly spoken about extremely long shifts while working on AI models and products.
One engineer posted that he had just finished a 19-hour workday that ended early in the morning, calling it the longest day he had worked at the company. Another employee shared that he once left the office after roughly 36 hours of continuous work.
Supporters of the company argue that the intense schedule shows the urgency of the global AI race and helps the team move quickly. Critics, however, say such work patterns may contribute to burnout and employee turnover.
