xAI founding member Toby Pohlen departs as Elon Musk’s AI startup faces wave of exits

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has lost another early team member, with founding member Toby Pohlen announcing his departure, adding to a series of high-profile exits from the company in recent weeks.

“Three years, thousands of PRs, and a million jokes. Today was my last day xai,” Pohlen wrote in a post on X. “To the team: you rock, no one burns the midnight oil better.”

Pohlen thanked Musk directly, saying, “Thanks for taking me on board. I've learnt more about execution, speed, and product perfectionism than I could ever have imagined.”

He did not announce a new role but said he planned to take time off. “My next priorities: sleep for more than 8h, write down all the things I've learnt (I have a list), and then think about what I want to do next,” he wrote.

The departure comes amid what appears to be a broader exodus from xAI. Two co-founders and at least six other researchers have left the company in recent weeks.

Jimmy Ba, a co-founder who led research and safety efforts, earlier said he would leave the company while remaining “a friend of the team.” His exit followed the departure of fellow co-founder Tony Wu, who led xAI’s reasoning team.

Several other technical staff, including researcher Hang Gao, have also announced exits.

The recent departures mean roughly half of xAI’s original founding group has now left.  

Earlier departures include infrastructure lead Kyle Kosic, who joined OpenAI in mid-2024, former Google engineer Christian Szegedy, who left in February last year, and Igor Babuschkin, who departed in August to launch a venture capital firm. Greg Yang, previously at Microsoft, stepped down last month citing health reasons.

The turnover comes as Musk’s startup races to compete with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic in building advanced AI systems, while scaling products such as its Grok chatbot and related infrastructure.