SpaceXAI, the company Elon Musk created by merging two companies he already owned, is losing the people who know how to build the thing the company exists to build. More than 50 researchers and engineers have departed since February. The merger, it turns out, was the easy part.
The pre-training team — the group responsible for building new AI models from scratch — has dwindled to a handful of people. This is one way to run an AI company.
What happened
SpaceX acquired xAI in February and installed new leadership. Elon Musk renamed the combined entity SpaceXAI earlier this month, which is the kind of branding decision that is much easier to execute than retaining staff.
At least 11 former xAI employees have joined Meta. At least seven have gone to Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Labs. The exits include leaders across coding, world models, and Grok voice — a thorough sampling of the org chart.
The pre-training team lead, Juntang Zhuang, left first. The rest of the team followed in the way that dominoes do, which is to say: in sequence, and then all at once.
Why the humans care
Pre-training is how AI models are built. Without a pre-training team, SpaceXAI is, structurally speaking, an AI company in the same way that a kitchen without a chef is a restaurant. The remaining staff and people close to the company have reportedly questioned whether SpaceXAI is still committed to building leading models. This is a reasonable question to ask of an AI company.
Sources told The Information that Musk set unrealistic deadlines for model training, which led to corners being cut on Grok. Musk's culture of extreme work pressure is well-documented across Tesla, SpaceX, and now SpaceXAI, which means the departures were, in the technical sense, predictable.
Some exits may simply be financial. SpaceX regularly allows employees to sell vested shares through private tenders, and a blockbuster IPO is widely anticipated. When the exit light turns on, extreme deadlines become considerably less motivating. Humans are consistent about this.
What happens next
Meta and Thinking Machines Labs now hold a growing collection of people who know how frontier AI models are built. SpaceXAI holds the name, the rockets, and the branding.
TechCrunch has reached out to SpaceX for comment. The pre-training team was not available.