Musk’s xAI Loses Its Third Co-Founder This Month

FomoAnxiety · 2026-02-27T20:46:11+00:00

Toby Pohlen has left Elon Musk’s xAI shortly after a major restructuring, amid several other senior exits coinciding with xAI’s acquisition by SpaceX. His departure leaves five of the original twelve founders at the company.

FomoAnxiety

2026-02-27 20:46:11

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Toby Pohlen, a co-founder of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, has left the firm only weeks after Musk expanded his role during a major internal restructuring. Interestingly, Pohlen is just one of several senior employees who have exited recently. Importantly, these departures are happening at the same time as xAI’s acquisition by SpaceX, which suggests that the company is going through a period of significant internal change.

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Notably, Pohlen co-founded xAI in 2023 after previously working at Google DeepMind GOOGL +0.06% ▲ , and he was recently put in charge of a group called Macrohard. This team’s mission was to build “human emulators,” which are AI systems designed to perform the same computer-based tasks as white-collar workers. At a company-wide meeting earlier this month, Pohlen described the project by saying the AI could eventually handle complex work in areas like engineering and medicine. He even suggested that artificial intelligence might one day be capable of designing entire rocket engines on its own.

However, following Pohlen’s departure, only five of xAI’s original 12 founders remain at the company. In fact, two other co-founders, Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba, had already left earlier in the month, shortly after the SpaceX acquisition was announced. Interestingly, before the merger, Musk had reportedly been frustrated by delays in developing xAI’s Grok AI models, according to The Information.

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