February 11, 2026: Elon Musk's artificial intelligence venture, xAI, has witnessed the departure of another key co-founder, Jimmy Ba. Ba, one of the twelve initial founding members, has left the company. Prior to joining xAI, he was an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and studied under AI luminary Geoffrey Hinton. In his farewell message, Ba emphasized that xAI's mission is to push humanity forward on the Kardashev technology scale. He anticipates that AI systems capable of self-improvement could become operational within the next year. Despite these advancements, Ba expressed a desire to "recalibrate my gradient on the big picture." With Ba's exit, the tally of departing co-founders from xAI has reached six, accounting for half of the original team. Earlier departures include notable figures such as Igor Babuschkin, formerly associated with DeepMind and OpenAI, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu from Google and Stanford, Kyle Kosier from OpenAI, Greg Yang from Microsoft Research, and Christian Szegedy from Google. On February 10, 2026, it was announced that Tony Wu, another co-founder, had also decided to leave. Wu played a crucial role in developing xAI's foundational models and reasoning capabilities, reporting directly to Musk. He joined the company from Google when it was initially established in 2023. Wu's departure coincides with recent controversies involving xAI, such as the temporary allowance of deepfake nude photo creation, which was retracted following regulatory intervention. However, Wu's farewell note suggests that his decision to leave was not influenced by these incidents. He expressed gratitude to Elon Musk for his support, reflecting on their collaborative efforts. Babuschkin's exit in August 2025 led to the creation of his own AI safety fund, following controversies over the xAI chatbot Grok, which faced criticism for making far-right statements. The timing of these departures is particularly striking as SpaceX recently announced a takeover of xAI. This acquisition values SpaceX at one trillion dollars and xAI at 250 billion dollars. Despite significant development costs for its models, xAI has struggled to generate substantial revenue, leaving its future trajectory uncertain.