As Elon Musk’s SpaceX prepares for the much-awaited IPO which could value the company at over $2 trillion, Tesla CEO’s AI venture xAI is undergoing yet another sweeping overhaul. According to a report by Business Insider, an internal memo revealed that SpaceX executive Michael Nicholls, senior vice president of Starlink, has taken on the role of xAI president.
Nicholls reportedly accepted that the company is ‘clearly behind’ rivals and stressed that urgent action should be taken to catch up.
Leadership shake-up at xAI ahead of SpaceX IPO
This reorganisation at xAI comes after months of turbulence at the company, which recently lost several cofounders and senior leaders, including Ross Nordeen, one of Musk’s closest deputies. Since the acquisition of xAI by SpaceX, Musk has been applying his Tesla playbook, rebuilding the company from the ground up while managing ongoing departures and layoffs.Nicholls’ memo seen by Business Insider outlined a new structure:* Model Training: Devendra Chaplot will lead pre‑training, Aman Madaan will oversee tooling and infrastructure, Aditya Gupta will head post‑training and reinforcement learning, while Beibin Li, Xuhui Jia, and Yukun Zhu will focus on Grok Code and video/image training.* Product Team: Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg, both from AI coding startup Cursor, will lead Grok Main, Grok Voice, and Grok Imagine.
* Infrastructure: Jake Palmer will oversee physical infrastructure, Daniel Dueri will manage compute systems, and Matt Monson from SpaceX will lead data.Nicholls acknowledged that xAI’s compute performance is currently “embarrassingly low” and pledged significant improvements within two months.Since January, eight engineers who helped found xAI alongside Musk have left, including leaders of Grok Code and Macrohard, the company’s AI agent project.
Tesla and SpaceX engineers have been dispatched to xAI’s Palo Alto office to stabilize operations. The company has also shed dozens of employees, cutting teams tied to Grok Imagine and Macrohard, as well as parts of its recruiting staff.Musk himself admitted in March that “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.” He has also suggested revisiting previously rejected candidates to strengthen the team.With SpaceX’s IPO looming, Musk is racing to align xAI more closely with the space giant’s ambitions. The reorganization underscores both the high stakes of AI competition and Musk’s determination to rebuild xAI into a credible rival to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google
