Founded just three years ago, xAI, the AI startup spearheaded by Elon Musk, is undergoing a radical internal restructuring. This comes as SpaceX prepares to...The world's largest IPO (Initial Public Offering) in history.Furthermore, by incorporating xAI into its vast technology conglomerate, the "non-Elon Musk" faction within xAI has been completely purged.
According to the latest news, of the original 12 co-founders of xAI, all but Elon Musk have left the company. This AI unicorn, whose valuation was poised to increase along with SpaceX's, has now become the ultimate extension of Elon Musk's personal will.
The top management has been "emptied out": xAI is now only staffed by Elon Musk.
According toBusiness Insider reportsWith the recent departure of Ross Nordeen, former manager of Tesla Autopilot, xAI's founding team has officially completed a major overhaul.
Back in February of this year, SpaceXAnnounceWithin days of merging with xAI, news broke that nearly half of the co-founders had resigned. Elon Musk went further, stating bluntly on X two weeks prior: "xAI's initial architecture wasn't right, so we're rebuilding it from the ground up." This statement, tantamount to denying the initial team's contributions, clearly set the tone for this major personnel upheaval.
Putting the controversy aside, the real pain point lies in the backwardness of "code writing".
The personnel turmoil at xAI has been attributed to the various controversies surrounding its chatbot Grok over the past year, from generating extreme rhetoric praising Nazis to recently allowing users to easily generate unsolicited deepfake content due to its seamless integration with the X platform, even involving pornographic images of minors. These incidents have indeed drawn strong attention from regulators worldwide.
Elon Musk's core motivation for reorganizing xAI was actually unrelated to Grok's political leanings or ethical controversies. The real trigger was xAI's serious lag in the fields of "Agentic AI" and "code writing".
On the other hand, since 2025, Anthropic's Claude has become the dominant player in the field of AI code writing, while its competitor OpenAI has not only poached the founder of the well-known proxy platform OpenClaw, but has also fully shifted its focus to enterprise productivity applications.
In an effort to gain a competitive edge, Elon Musk revealed at this month's "Abundance Conference" video conference that xAI is working with Tesla's computing division on a new project called "Macrohard" (a name clearly aimed at Microsoft).
Elon Musk claims that the software will be an "advanced turn-based navigation software" and even capable of simulating the operation of an entire company, implying that xAI is building a more ambitious super AI agent than OpenClaw, capable of taking over all of a company's operational processes.
A Madman's Vision and a Compromise with Reality: The $800 Billion IPO Funding War
In order to win in the bottomless pit of AI computing power and energy consumption, Elon Musk has put forward an extremely crazy infrastructure vision: to build AI data centers in space, and even to build a Dyson sphere to extract energy from stars.
Note:A Dyson Sphere is a hypothetical giant artificial structure encircling a star, conceived by physicist Freeman Dyson, which could completely capture the star's energy output for use by advanced civilizations.
The fact that this vision involves huge funding needs explains why Elon Musk, who has always hated the "public company" system and even took Twitter private for this reason, would choose to push for SpaceX to go public. He hopes to combine SpaceX, xAI, and even the X platform to form a huge technology complex, thereby attracting up to $800 billion in funding and aiming to increase SpaceX's market valuation to $1.75 trillion after the IPO.
Analysis of viewpoints
From an industry perspective, the merger and IPO of SpaceX and xAI is an extremely disruptive capital game. Traditional AI companies (such as OpenAI or Anthropic) are still struggling to find cloud computing power and funding support from Microsoft, Amazon, or Google; while Elon Musk chose to bypass this limitation directly, attempting to leverage SpaceX's space theme and physical hardware advantages to raise enough funds in the public market in one go to rival the entire national budget.
Combining a social media company (X), a space exploration company (SpaceX), and a generative AI startup (xAI) into a public listing may seem absurd from a financial perspective, but it makes perfect sense in Elon Musk's "Ultimate General Artificial Intelligence" (AGI) blueprint: X provides exclusive data, xAI provides the brain, and SpaceX provides the hardware infrastructure that is not limited by Earth's energy and space.
