xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, just lost yet another cofounder.
Tony Wu announced on X today that he has resigned from the company, becoming the latest founding member to depart the AI startup since its launch in 2023.
“This company – and the family we became – will stay with me forever. I will deeply miss the people, the warrooms, and all those battles we have fought together,” wrote Wu in a post. “It’s time for my next chapter. It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”
He added that he was grateful to Musk for “believing in the mission” and “the ride of a lifetime.”
xAI was founded in 2023 by Musk and 11 other cofounders, many of whom previously worked at companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. That same year, the company released Grok as an alternative to popular chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
Before founding xAI, Musk repeatedly complained that mainstream chatbots were too woke.
“The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly,” Musk wrote in a 2022 post on X.
In contrast, Grok was designed to be “useful to people of all backgrounds and political views.”
However, in the years since xAI was founded, the company has experienced its share of ups and downs. The AI company merged with Musk’s social media platform X early last year. And just this month, xAI merged with another one of Musk’s companies, this time SpaceX. This merger comes as SpaceX is reportedly set to go public and launch an initial public offering this year.
Meanwhile, Grok and X have faced mounting regulatory scrutiny in Europe. Paris prosecutors’ cybercrime unit, along with Europol and French national police, raided X’s offices last week as part of an investigation that began in January 2025. The probe initially focused on suspected manipulation of X’s recommendation algorithm and the extraction of unauthorized data. It has since widened to examine other possible violations, including complicity in the spread of pornographic images involving minors, the use of sexual deepfakes that infringe on people’s rights, and the circulation of Holocaust denial content.
The city prosecutor’s office also announced that it has issued summonses to Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino for a hearing scheduled for April.
X is also facing scrutiny from authorities in the U.K., the European Union, and California over similar concerns.
Wu is not the first cofounder to leave. Kyle Kosic, Igor Babuschkin, and Christian Szegedy all departed over the past two years. And Greg Yang posted on X last month that he would step back from the company to focus on his health after being diagnosed with Lyme disease.
Meanwhile, xAI is looking to hire. In a push to get the word out, one of the AI company’s engineers, Ethan He, did his best to make it sound like a mundane company where a “small focused team” moves quickly to execute ambitious goals. “No politics,” He emphasized.
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