Ross Nordeen, the final remaining cofounder of Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI, has departed the company. His exit marks the end of the original founding team that Musk assembled in 2023. Nordeen, who served as Musk's primary operator at xAI, previously worked on Tesla's Autopilot team and was part of the smaller engineering group that helped Musk execute significant workforce reductions at Twitter in 2022. According to reports, Nordeen has lost his employee access badge for X, the platform owned by Musk, signaling his complete separation from the organization. This departure occurs amidst a period of significant turbulence and restructuring for xAI. The company recently lost eight cofounders since January, including Manuel Kroiss, who led the pretraining division and reported directly to Musk. These exodus events began shortly after SpaceX, Musk's rocket company, acquired xAI in February in preparation for a potential initial public offering of SpaceX, which could become the most valuable IPO in history. Musk has stated that xAI was not built correctly the first time and is now being rebuilt from the foundations up. Since the February merger, xAI has undergone multiple reorganizations. Many leaders previously placed in charge of key projects, ranging from coding tools to image generation, have left the firm. The company has shed dozens of employees over recent months following cuts to specific teams, including those working on its video and image generation tool, Grok Imagine, and Macrohard, an AI agent project. Despite being one of the best-funded entities in the AI race with a reported valuation of approximately $250 billion, xAI still trails behind major competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of overall scale and market reach. In response to the instability, Musk has indicated that the company is actively recruiting new talent, including candidates who were previously overlooked. In the last few weeks, xAI has hired nearly a dozen new employees, including two senior leaders from the AI coding firm Cursor, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg. While the company continues to pivot its focus, the rapid turnover of its founding leadership has raised questions about its long-term stability and strategic direction as it prepares for a future where it may operate under the SpaceX umbrella. Neither xAI nor Ross Nordeen's representatives immediately commented on the situation.