Musk reorganizes xAI after SpaceX merger and ahead of blockbuster IPO
Musk reorganizes xAI after SpaceX merger and ahead of blockbuster IPO
Publish Date: 2026-02-18 09:48:00
Source Domain: www.aol.com
By Juby Babu and Krystal Hu
Feb 11 (Reuters) – Billionaire Elon Musk has overhauled the management of his artificial intelligence startup xAI ahead of a planned initial public offering that could rank among the largest ever, after merging the company with his rocket firm SpaceX.
The reorganization announced on Wednesday follows the recent departures of several co-founders at the three-year-old AI company, leaving only half of the startup’s original 12 co-founders and raising questions about stability as Musk pushes to compete with OpenAI and Google on all fronts.
“We’re organizing because we’ve reached a certain scale. We’re organizing the company to be more effective at this scale. Now, naturally, when this happens, there’s some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages,” Musk said at an xAI all-hands meeting, according to video footage posted by the company on X.
The changes come after co-founders Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba said in social media posts they had resigned this week from the AI firm they launched with Musk.
Traffic on xAI’s chatbot website Grok.com, while growing steadily, remains a distant third globally, accounting for about 3.4% of generative AI chatbot traffic, compared with 64.5% for ChatGPT and 21.5% for Google’s Gemini, according to January data from Similarweb.
‘INTERSTELLAR AMBITIONS’
During the all-hands meeting, Musk outlined plans to build a full-scale AI company competing in large language models, image and video generation systems and coding tools, as xAI seeks to catch up with rivals. He and other executives said the company is pushing to recruit talent, as competition for top AI researchers intensifies.
“We are hiring, and we’re looking for intelligent and smart people. This is not an easy place to work … It’s a grind, but we have, I guess, like interstellar ambitions,” he said.
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