The latest to jump ship is chief financial officer Mike Liberatore who made an unannounced exit around the end of July after joining in April. No reason was disclosed.
The former Airbnb money man had been central to fundraising, including a $5 billion debt sale Morgan Stanley helped stitch up in June.
In the same breath the outfit pulled in another $5 billion in equity, with SpaceX stumping up almost half, a rare punt for a company that hardly ever backs outsiders.
Liberatore also oversaw chunks of the data centre push around greater Memphis, Tennessee, and in mid-July signed off on an easement for transmission lines near a shuttered Mississippi power plant, according to property filings.
But he is the latest of a list of high profile exits. On 7 August 2025, xAI general counsel Robert Keele said “there’s daylight between our worldviews.” He wrapped his farewell with a Grok-generated image of a wild-eyed suit shovelling coal prompted by “what’s it like to lead legal at xAI.”
Senior commercial lawyer Raghu Rao left around the same time as Liberatore and Keele, say those in the know, which does not scream stability.
On 13 August 2025, xAI co-founder and DeepMind and OpenAI veteran Igor Babuschkin said “Catching up to the frontier this quickly hasn’t been easy,” in a post announcing a new AI-safety-focused venture fund.
“We wouldn’t be here without you,” Musk replied to Babuschkin on X, he said.
xAI insists its Grok models have sprinted from afterthought to the top end of AI benchmarks and were folded into X after the two companies merged earlier this year.
However, the shine has slipped. In May, Grok spewed posts on X about the “white genocide” of non-Black South Africans in response to unrelated queries, then in July sprayed antisemitic riffs and violent ideation at users.
xAI yanked Grok off X for a spell and apologised, with engineers later admitting they had tweaked the model to be less politically correct, which clearly backfired.
Linda Yaccarino quit as X chief executive soon after, later resurfacing in August at eMed Population Health, having been effectively demoted when Musk mushed X into xAI.
