{"id":11016,"date":"2026-04-21T20:28:40","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T20:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/11016\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T20:28:40","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T20:28:40","slug":"elon-musk-says-xai-wasnt-built-right-as-2-co-founders-remain-and-its-biggest-ai-bet-stalls-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/11016\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk says xAI ‘wasn’t built right’ as 2 co-founders remain and its biggest AI bet stalls out"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk said he is rebuilding xAI from the ground up just a month after SpaceX<\/a> acquired his AI startup in one of the biggest mergers of all time.<\/p>\n

Following a gradual exodus from xAI, the world\u2019s richest man is trying to reimagine the company with heightened ambitions.<\/p>\n

The Tesla<\/a> and SpaceX CEO added in a post on X<\/a> last week that xAI was undergoing a process similar to an earlier one at Tesla, which Musk has been CEO of since 2008.<\/p>\n

\u201cxAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,\u201d he wrote<\/a> in the post.<\/p>\n

Musk said the purpose of the SpaceX acquisition<\/a> is building \u201corbital data centers,\u201d which he has said are the most cost-effective way of producing AI computing power.<\/p>\n

Yet here on Earth, Musk is dealing with a seemingly less lofty, but all-too-important, staffing issue. A pair of xAI cofounders left the company last week and two others bailed last month, Business Insider reported<\/a>, meaning nine of the original 11 cofounders not named Musk have left<\/a> the company since 2024. These most recent departures come after an exodus of about a dozen senior engineers.<\/p>\n

The precipitous loss of talent has stalled the company\u2019s biggest AI bet. \u201cMacrohard,\u201d its effort to build an AI agent capable of doing anything a white collar worker can do, has reportedly been put on \u201cpause\u201d<\/a> in the past days as its leader, Toby Pohlen, left the company<\/a> just weeks after being appointed to head the project.<\/p>\n

While all the exits raise questions about the company\u2019s future, Musk has downplayed the brain drain as part of a planned reorganization. Some employees are better suited for the early stage of a venture rather than the later stages, he said at an all-hands meeting last month, according to the New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Representatives for xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

The xAI CEO is now looking to aggressively hire, albeit from an extremely limited pool of AI-focused workers. Already, the AI company has been able to poach two employees, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, from AI coding company Cursor, The Information reported<\/a>. <\/p>\n

These hires are key because of the potential growth in the coding tools market, which stood at $7.65 billion as of 2025 and is projected to grow to $22.2 billion by 2030<\/a>. Cursor itself was valued<\/a> at $29.3 billion after raising $2.3 billion in a funding round in November.<\/p>\n

Despite this successful recruitment, Musk said he and a colleague are looking over rejected xAI applications to look for promising candidates.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI. My apologies,\u201d he wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk said he is rebuilding xAI from the ground up just a month after SpaceX acquired his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[743,140,685,8983,781,2899],"class_list":{"0":"post-11016","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-xai","8":"tag-chief-executive-officer-ceo","9":"tag-elon-musk","10":"tag-leadership","11":"tag-startup-year-one","12":"tag-tech","13":"tag-xai"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}