Because those reports use different cofounder baselines — 12 in TechCrunch and 11 in The Next Web — the safest summary is: xAI faced a major cofounder exodus, and one later report said all 11 cofounders had reportedly left .
That timeline explains why the shorthand spread: the underlying story was significant. But it also shows why “everyone quit” is imprecise. The reporting is about cofounders, researchers, senior engineers, and top employees — not the full workforce .
One source of the more dramatic wording is a YouTube video published Apr. 22, 2026, titled “The $250 Billion Lie. Why Musk’s Elite Team All QUIT.” Its snippet says Musk’s “entire team vanished” .
That phrasing is stronger than what the core reports establish. A more accurate version would be: xAI reportedly lost many founding and senior technical leaders, and The Next Web later reported that all 11 cofounders had departed . That is not the same as proving that the whole company quit.
The named departures included several senior technical figures. Fortune identified Jimmy Ba, described as a cofounder who led research and safety efforts, and Tony Wu, described as a cofounder who led the reasoning team, among the exits . Business Insider also listed Ba and Wu among xAI’s recent top employee departures
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The Next Web later named Manuel Kroiss, described as having led the pretraining team, and Ross Nordeen, described by Business Insider as Musk’s “right-hand operator,” as the last two of 11 cofounders to leave .
Musk’s public framing was that xAI was restructuring as it scaled. TechCrunch reported that Musk told staff, “Because we’ve reached a certain scale, we’re organizing the company to be more effective at this scale,” and added that some people are better suited to early-stage companies than later-stage operations . Business Insider likewise reported that Musk told xAI’s workforce the company was restructuring as it continued to grow
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That does not prove one universal reason for every departure. Fortune reported that Ba’s public note thanked Musk and said he would “continue to stay close as a friend of the team,” which makes it difficult to reduce every exit to a single hostile or voluntary explanation .
Some secondary claims go beyond the best-supported version of the story. A Metaintro post says all 11 original cofounders and more than 80 researchers and engineers had left xAI . The all-11-cofounder claim overlaps with The Next Web’s report, but the “80+” figure is not established across the Fortune, TechCrunch, Business Insider, and The Next Web reports cited here
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The viral “all quit” claim needs qualification. Reporting shows a serious xAI leadership and research-talent shake-up, including many cofounder departures and, according to The Next Web, all 11 cofounders reportedly leaving by late March 2026 . It does not show that xAI’s entire workforce quit, and it does not prove a single reason behind every departure.
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