No Retention: Elon Musk's xAI's Last Co-Founder Resigns

MaticHoleFiller · 2026-04-02T01:26:24+00:00

The last member of the founding team of xAI, Ross Noding, has left, marking further progress in the restructuring of the AI company led by Elon Musk. Noding previously played a key role at xAI and is now preparing for the IPO of SpaceX.

MaticHoleFiller

2026-04-02 01:26:24

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According to people familiar with the matter, one of the 11 founders who co-founded xAI with Elon Musk, Ross Nodding, left the company on Friday. This means that the final member of xAI’s founding team has also left the company. At present, the verification badge on Nodding’s X account indicating he is an xAI employee has also disappeared.

At the time of this departure, Musk was in the process of reorganizing xAI and preparing for the major IPO of his rocket company SpaceX. SpaceX completed its acquisition of this artificial intelligence startup in February of this year.

Insiders say that the 36-year-old Nodding, who reported directly to Musk at xAI, served as one of his key power assistants, responsible for coordinating the company’s core matters and driving the execution of various initiatives.

Nodding graduated from Michigan Technological University, and in 2023 he followed Musk after Musk left Tesla, co-founding this AI company. According to a 2021 organizational chart obtained by Business Insider, during his time at Tesla, Nodding was a technical project manager for the Autopilot team, helping set up data centers used to train Tesla’s fully autonomous driving system.

Nodding is a longtime friend of James Musk, Elon Musk’s cousin. After Musk took over Twitter in 2022, Nodding was also one of dozens of engineers from Tesla and SpaceX, helping Musk coordinate his large-scale layoffs.

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