Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has restructured the leadership of his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, following its merger with SpaceX and ahead of a planned initial public offering (IPO) expected to rank among the largest in history.
The reorganisation comes amid the departure of several co-founders from the three-year-old company, leaving only half of its original founding team and raising concerns about stability as the firm intensifies competition with major AI players such as OpenAI and Google.
Musk said the restructuring was necessary to improve operational efficiency as the company expands.
We’re organising because we’ve reached a certain scale. Some people are better suited to early-stage companies than later growth phases,he said during an internal company meeting.
Recent exits include co-founders Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba, who confirmed their resignations in separate social media posts.
Despite steady growth, xAI’s chatbot platform Grok still trails competitors globally, accounting for about 3.4 per cent of generative AI chatbot traffic, compared with roughly 64.5 per cent for ChatGPT and 21.5 per cent for Google’s Gemini, according to recent industry data.
Musk outlined plans to build a full-scale AI ecosystem spanning large language models, image and video generation, and advanced coding tools as the company seeks to close the gap with established rivals.
He noted that the firm is actively recruiting top AI talent, emphasising the demanding nature of the work but describing the company’s goals as having “interstellar ambitions.
Executives highlighted access to high-powered computing infrastructure including a training cluster equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 GPUs as a key attraction for researchers. Long-term plans reportedly include launching orbital data centres supported by SpaceX.
The restructuring follows SpaceX’s announcement that it would acquire xAI to form a combined company valued at approximately $1.25 trillion, with plans to go public later this year. The IPO is expected to help finance Musk’s vision of deploying data centres in space.
xAI executives also pointed to progress in multimedia AI development, saying the company’s systems have generated significantly more images than some rival platforms. However, its Grok chatbot has faced regulatory scrutiny over the generation of explicit images.
Under the reorganisation:
-
Aman Madaan will lead Grok’s core model and voice initiatives.
-
Manuel Kroiss will oversee coding models and machine-learning infrastructure.
-
Co-founder Guodong Zhang will head multimedia efforts under the Imagine team.
-
Toby Pohlen will manage automation initiatives through the Macrohard unit.
Coding technology remains a priority, with Musk predicting rapid advances in AI-generated software development.
“Soon, you may not need to code manually AI could generate the final software directly,” he said.
The overhaul signals Musk’s determination to position xAI as a major global competitor in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence industry.
