Musk Restructures xAI Team Amid Senior Departures, SpaceX Merger
The Takeaway
- xAI co-founders Guodong Zhang, Toby Pohlen take on bigger roles
- SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen oversees Anthony Armstrong, who was hired as xAI CFO last fall
- Young Musk protégé Diego Pasini leads AI tutors, Grokipedia
The xAI reorg has elevated a handful of technical leaders who now report directly to Musk, including co-founder Guodong Zhang, who leads teams working on coding and image-generation features while also overseeing the leadership team of social media service X, according to a person with direct knowledge of xAI’s operations. Another co-founder, Manuel Kroiss, is also leading xAI’s coding teams alongside Zhang.
Musk has so far left SpaceX’s structure largely untouched, with most of the space firm’s longtime senior leadership team continuing to report to President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell as they focus on getting the company’s Starship into service.
While xAI and SpaceX’s teams are continuing to operate largely separately and in parallel under Musk, there is some overlap. Anthony Armstrong, a former Morgan Stanley banker who was hired as chief financial officer of xAI last fall, now reports to Bret Johnsen, who is CFO of the combined company.
Johnsen has to figure out how to balance SpaceX’s business, which brought in approximately $8 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization last year on about $16 billion in revenue, with the huge cash demands of xAI. The AI startup was burning about $1 billion a month for most of 2025 before it merged with SpaceX last Monday, and it is continuing to build out expensive data centers.
Inside xAI, Musk has recently expressed frustration that the company’s data center buildout hasn’t led to a durable lead for the AI models developed by its engineering team, according to the person with direct knowledge of xAI’s operations. That frustration helped prompt development of the new leadership structure, which Musk discussed in an all-hands meeting this Tuesday.
Also on Tuesday, two xAI co-founders, Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba, announced they had left the company. It’s the latest in several overhauls of xAI’s leadership since the company was founded in 2023, which have also contributed to the departures of other key founding staff, including Igor Babuschkin and Christian Szegedy. (One of the co-founders, Greg Yang, did not resign but said in January that he’d moved to an informal advisory role at xAI after working hard at the company aggravated his Lyme disease.)
After publication of this story, Musk posted on X about a reorg. “xAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve speed of execution. As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve just like any living organism,” he said. “This unfortunately required parting ways with some people. We wish them well in future endeavors.”
Under xAI’s latest leadership structure, a co-founder and former Google DeepMind engineer, Toby Pohlen, now leads the company’s Macrohard team, which evolved from a dig at Microsoft and is now part of an effort to automate white-collar work. In an interview published last week, Musk described Macrohard as a “digital human emulation” project that aims to “do anything that a human with access to a computer could do.”
XAI hopes to make its Grok coding tools competitive with the likes of Anthropic’s Claude Code and wants to win over big enterprise customers.
Diego Pasini, a Musk protégé who graduated high school in 2023 and won an xAI hackathon in 2024, still oversees xAI’s AI tutors, who provide specialized data about topics like finance and physics to train its Grok models. Pasini’s responsibilities also now include Grokipedia, which Musk has described as a Grok-powered encyclopedia that is a less “woke” alternative to Wikipedia.
While most core xAI employees are referred to only as “member of technical staff” internally, The Information’s org chart includes more detailed descriptions of their responsibilities when possible.
The org chart also includes several other longer-tenured staff who joined xAI from other Musk companies to build out its data centers, including former Tesla staffer Daniel Rowland and Brent Mayo, who had joined xAI from SpaceX when they were separate companies.
While Musk has said part of the reason for merging xAI into SpaceX is the potential to build data centers in space, xAI is continuing to build out data centers on Earth for now. In December, xAI purchased a building for a third large data center outside Memphis, Tenn., The Information reported, part of a plan to get a million Nvidia graphics processing units online in the region.
XAI and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.