Jimmy Ba Quits xAI, Sixth Co-Founder to Exit

Jimmy Ba, co-founder of Elon Musk-led artificial intelligence startup xAI, has announced that he is leaving the company.

Ba shared the update on social media, calling it his last day at xAI. He thanked Elon Musk for bringing the founding team together and said he was proud of what the team has achieved so far. He also mentioned that he would continue to remain close to the team as a friend.

In his post, Ba reflected on the rapid pace of technological progress and suggested that the coming year could be highly significant for artificial intelligence and productivity tools. However, he did not provide specific reasons for his departure.

His announcement comes nearly 48 hours after another xAI co-founder, Yuhuai “Tony” Wu, revealed that he was also stepping away from the company to begin what he described as a new chapter.

Ba is now the sixth member of xAI’s 12-person founding team to exit the startup.

According to publicly available information, Ba is a Canadian machine learning researcher and an associate professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. He completed his PhD under noted AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton in 2018. He joined Elon Musk and other researchers to co-found xAI in July 2023.

Over the past two years, several other founding members have left the company. Infrastructure lead Kyle Kosic reportedly moved to OpenAI in 2024. Christian Szegedy, who previously worked at Google for over a decade, exited in 2025. Igor Babuschkin left last year to start a venture firm, and Greg Yang stepped down in January 2026, citing health reasons.

The recent departures have prompted questions on social media about changes within xAI. Some users expressed curiosity about the leadership transitions, while others praised Ba’s contributions and wished him well.

xAI, founded by Elon Musk, focuses on developing advanced artificial intelligence systems. The company has positioned itself as a competitor in the rapidly evolving AI sector, which includes major players such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic.

As of now, neither xAI nor Elon Musk has issued an additional statement regarding Ba’s exit beyond his own announcement.

The company continues to operate in a highly competitive AI landscape, where talent movement between firms has become common.