xAI is continuing to bleed co-founders at an astonishing rate.
Toby Pohlen, a co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI, announced his resignation today in a post on X, marking the sixth co-founder departure from the company since its founding. “Three years, thousands of PRs, and a million jokes. Today was my last day @xai,” Pohlen wrote, thanking the team and Musk directly. “To @elonmusk, thanks for taking me on board. I’ve learnt more about execution, speed, and product perfectionism than I could ever have imagined.”
Pohlendid not announce any immediate next steps, instead outlining a more measured transition: “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.” Elon Musk responded to the post, writing “Thanks for helping get xAI to where it is.”
Pohlen’s departure brings the total number of co-founder exits to six, leaving xAI with just six of its original twelve co-founders. He follows Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, who resigned earlier this month as the fifth co-founder to leave. Wu’s departure had itself come on the heels of Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic, Christian Szegedy, and Greg Yang — Babuschkin departing in August 2025 to launch a venture capital firm focused on safe AI development, Kosic leaving in 2024 to join OpenAI, Szegedy also departing in 2024 for Morph Labs, and Yang leaving last month citing health issues following a Lupus diagnosis.
The pace of departures is notable even by the turbulent standards of the AI industry. xAI, founded with twelve co-founders, has now lost exactly half its founding team in a relatively short window. When Wu resigned, the company had already been placed within a broader pattern of leadership instability across top AI labs — OpenAI has seen eight of its eleven original co-founders depart, and Thinking Machines, co-founded by former OpenAI CEO Mira Murati, has lost three of its six co-founders. Against this backdrop, Anthropic remains the sole major AI laboratory to have retained its entire founding team, with all seven co-founders including CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei still at the company.
Whether the accelerating rate of co-founder departures at xAI will affect its trajectory in the AI race remains to be seen. But with six of twelve founders now gone in under three years, the question of institutional continuity at one of the industry’s most ambitious ventures is becoming harder to ignore.