xAI: Company departures and plans for a satellite factory on the Moon

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A lot is currently in flux at xAI. According to media reports, six of the original twelve founders of Elon Musk's AI startup have left the company. Now follows a restructuring that Musk deems necessary.

Last Monday, xAI co-founder Yuhuai Wu announced via X that he was withdrawing from the company. Wu did not disclose any reasons for his departure. A day later, Jimmy Ba, also a co-founder of xAI and directly subordinate to Musk, announced his resignation. Ba also did not provide any reasons for his resignation.

Even before that, key individuals from xAI's founding team had left the company. Kyle Kosic, co-founder and former head of infrastructure, moved to OpenAI in mid-2024. Last year, Christian Szegedy, Igor Babuschkin, and Greg Yang, three more key figures from xAI, departed.

Alleged strategic restructuring

Musk announced the founding of xAI in July 2023. For the twelve-person founding team of the AI startup, profiled engineers and AI scientists from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Tesla were recruited at the time.

Musk now declares that half of xAI's founding team has left as a necessary restructuring of the company. At a company-wide employee meeting last Tuesday, he spoke of xAI having reached a size that necessitates a reorganization to further increase the company's effectiveness.

In an X post, Musk made it clear again that the departures at xAI were by no means voluntary. “As a company grows, especially as fast as xAI, the structure must evolve like any living organism. This unfortunately required parting ways with some employees,” he wrote on X.

Targeted publicity

It remains open whether Musk's account is accurate. The narrative of strategic restructuring at xAI was likely not spread without calculation; Musk's AI company is currently in a critical phase.

Just last week, Musk announced the acquisition of xAI by SpaceX, his space exploration company. The merger of both companies at this time seems well-considered, as SpaceX plans to go public this year. To achieve this, the US billionaire wants to bring as many of his companies as possible under one roof.

As part of the acquisition of xAI by SpaceX, Musk also announced plans for data centers stationed in space. His intention to bring millions of satellites into low Earth orbit to generate energy for AI data centers extraterrestrially using solar energy was reaffirmed by Musk at xAI's employee meeting on Tuesday.

Even more so, the US billionaire outlined the vision of a factory for satellites stationed on the Moon. Musk wants to launch the satellites from the Moon using a mass driver, a type of electromagnetic catapult. According to Musk, such a satellite infrastructure would be capable of harnessing a significant portion of the total solar energy.

xAI recently heavily criticized

Recently, there has been criticism of xAI's main product, the chatbot Grok. Numerous people had used the chatbot's image generation function to generate legally actionable, non-consensual nude images of women and minors, as well as allegedly gender-specific depictions of violence. Within a few days, millions of sexualized deepfakes were created, most of them publicly viewable on Grok's X account.

At the end of January, the EU Commission therefore initiated further proceedings against X, this time under the Digital Services Act. X had not conducted a risk assessment before integrating Grok's AI offering, the Commission explained.

According to a media report by The Washington Post, the deepfakes may have been intentionally generated to increase X's popularity. This is suggested by documents and statements from former xAI employees that the US daily newspaper has obtained.

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