Amid xAI co-founder exits, Elon Musk poaches key engineers from AI coding startup Cursor

Elon Musk’s xAI is experiencing major co-founder exits, with Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang becoming the latest in the wave of departures. On the other hand, the company is also actively hiring new talent in a deliberate attempt to rebuild the company from the ground up. 

Recently, xAI has hired two senior leaders from AI coding startup Cursor, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, both confirmed sharing X (formerly Twitter) posts. Milich and Ginsberg were part of the product engineering team at Cursor, which grew to a $2 billion annualised revenue. Now, both the engineers will be directly reporting to Musk.

xAI's recent co-founder exits

Zihang Dai, one of xAI’s co-founder has reportedly left the company last week, and he also does not have the xAI badge on his X profile. Zhang has plans to leave in the coming days, according to The Information report. 

If true, this exit follows the recent departure of xAI cofounders, including Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang. Therefore, only Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen of the 11 people who started the xAI with Musk will remain.

xAI hiring spree

Now, xAI has announced that it will be hiring more people across teams and for its new joint project with Tesla, dubbed “Marcohard.” We can say that the company is building an entirely new team amid layoffs and the co-founder's exit. 

Musk also shared an X post apologising about its hiring missteps, and plans to review interview records to identify talent the company had wrongly overlooked. The post said, “Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview 
@xAI. My apologies.”

“@BarisAkis and I are going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates,” he added.