Elon Musk’s newly rebranded SpaceXAI is reportedly facing a significant wave of employee departures following the merger between SpaceX and xAI earlier this year. According to The Information, more than 50 researchers and engineers have left the company since February, including senior staff working on coding systems, world models, and Grok voice technologies.
The exits reportedly include members of the company’s pre-training division, a critical group responsible for developing foundational AI models. Concerns inside the company intensified after the departure of pre-training lead Juntang Zhuang, with sources telling The Information that the once-core team has now shrunk to only a small number of researchers.
Competitors are reportedly moving quickly to recruit former SpaceXAI employees. At least 11 former xAI staff members have joined Meta since February, while another seven reportedly moved to Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab. TechCrunch previously reported that 11 employees left xAI shortly after the merger announcement, including two company co-founders.
SpaceX acquired xAI in February in a deal that consolidated two Musk-controlled businesses under a single structure. Earlier this month, Musk officially renamed the combined entity SpaceXAI as part of a broader effort to integrate AI development more closely with SpaceX’s infrastructure and computing resources.
The departures have fueled questions about whether the company remains fully committed to training frontier AI models at the same pace as rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google. Pre-training teams are considered central to building large-scale AI systems because they handle the initial development and large-scale training process underlying advanced models.
Sources cited in the report also pointed to internal pressure and demanding work expectations as contributing factors. Employees reportedly faced aggressive timelines for model training and product delivery, with some claiming that rapid deadlines led to compromises in Grok’s development process.
At the same time, financial incentives may also be driving some exits. SpaceX regularly conducts secondary share sales that allow employees to sell vested equity privately, and speculation around a future IPO could encourage workers to leave once their holdings gain substantial value.
