Other recent high-profile
a different company
Wu leaves a company that is in a very different place than when he helped build it in 2023. His departure comes just days after CEO Elon Musk announced plans to merge XAI with SpaceX, a move Musk says will allow orbiting data centers and, ultimately, “scaling up to create a sentient sun to understand the universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!” But some see the move as a financial engineering play, combining xAI’s roughly $1 billion a year losses and SpaceX’s roughly $8 billion annual profits into a single, more IPO-ready entity.
Musk had earlier in March merged social media network X (formerly Twitter) into a unified entity with XAI. At the time of the deal, X was valued at $33 billion, which is 25 percent less than the price Musk paid for the social network in 2022.
xAI has faced a new wave of criticism in recent months over Grok’s willingness to create sexualized images of minors. This led to an investigation by the California Attorney General and a police raid on the company’s Paris offices.
<a href