Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI has been bleeding staff since its merger

Elon Musk’s newly rebranded SpaceXAI is reportedly losing top talent, with more than 50 researchers and engineers departing since February, according to The Information. The exits include key leaders across coding, world models, and Grok voice. Rivals like Meta and Thinking Machine Labs are reportedly scooping up former staff, with the company’s core pre-training team dwindling to just a handful of people. Since February, at least 11 xAI employees have defected to Meta, according to The Information’s report. At least seven have left to join Mira Murati’s Thinking Machine Labs. TechCrunch has previously reported on 11 of the xAI departures announced directly after the merger, including two co-founders . SpaceX acquired xAI — two companies owned by Musk — in February and has since installed new leadership at the company. Musk renamed the combined company SpaceXAI earlier this month. The pre-training departures, which followed the exit of team lead Juntang Zhuang, have particularly concerned employees and people close to SpaceXAI, per The Information. Pre-training is the first step to building new AI models, and many have questioned whether the company is still committed to developing leading models. The report also found that Musk’s culture of extreme work led some staff to leave — something Musk employees across his companies, including Tesla, have complained about. …