Elon Musk monitors the market seven days a week, forcing over 50 core R&D team members to leave, and the SpaceX AI pre-training team is almost back to zero.

According to Beating Monitoring, the talent loss at SpaceXAI (formerly xAI) is much more severe than previously known. Yesterday, this channel reported that the heads of pre-training, Zhuang Juntang, search and training, Tianyi Zhang, and speech, David Haxton, all resigned within a week, and the latest disclosures show that since SpaceX’s acquisition was completed in February, over 50 Grok model researchers have left through layoffs, dismissals, or voluntary departures. The R&D team had over 200 people at the end of last year, but now it has shrunk significantly, with only a few members remaining in the pre-training team.

Several former employees directly attribute the cause to Musk’s management style. During his intense focus on AI business, the team was required to attend meetings at the Palo Alto office seven days a week, while also facing internally perceived unrealistic model training deadlines. To rush the work, the team had to skip critical steps that affect model performance. Musk announced in April that the model factory was operational, and since then, a new base model has been released every two weeks, but the originally scheduled Grok 4.4 with 1 trillion parameters, due in early May, has yet to appear.

The talent loss is being quickly absorbed by competitors. Meta has hired at least 11 people, Thinking Machines led by Mira Murati has brought in at least 7 people, and former code lead Beibin Li joined MiroMind, founded by Chen Tianqiao. Meanwhile, SpaceXAI also leased all computing power of a large data center under its banner to Anthropic.