Mike Liberatore, chief monetary officer of Elon Musk’s xAI, has left the corporate after simply three months, the Wall Road Journal first reported. His exit provides to a wave of high-profile turnover on the startup. Launched by Musk in 2023, xAI is finest recognized for its Grok chatbot. The corporate’s know-how has shortly caught as much as opponents, however Grok has additionally made headlines for controversial outputs and now for a string of govt departures.
Liberatore joined xAI in April after eight years at Airbnb, the place he was vp of finance and company improvement. He additionally beforehand labored at PayPal and eBay. At xAI, he was reportedly concerned in fundraising and oversaw knowledge heart growth efforts in Memphis, Tenn. Liberatore left in July, in response to the Journal.
Across the identical time, Raghu Rao, xAI’s former business lead, additionally departed. Rao had joined in April following roles at Zoom, Ernst & Younger and Deloitte.
One other loss got here this summer season when Robert Keele, a member of xAI’s authorized staff, stepped away from his position as normal counsel. “Working with Elon on this tech, at the moment, was the journey of a lifetime,” Keele wrote in an Aug. 5 X submit. He stated he was leaving to spend extra time together with his household. His farewell included a Grok-generated video of a person in a swimsuit shoveling coal, which Keele stated was the chatbot’s response to the immediate: “What’s it like to steer authorized at xAI?”
Musk constructed xAI in only a few years with a founding staff largely drawn from OpenAI and Google. Of the dozen co-founders, a minimum of three have since left. Kyle Kosic is now at OpenAI, whereas Christian Szegedy grew to become chief scientist at Morph Labs. Each departed final yr.
The latest co-founder to exit was Igor Babushkin, who led engineering groups on the agency earlier than leaving in August to launch his personal enterprise capital agency targeted on A.I. startups and agentic techniques. “We wouldn’t be right here with out you,” stated Musk in an Aug. 13 submit responding to Babushkin’s announcement.
Not each departure has been as cordial. Final month, xAI filed a lawsuit towards Xuechen Li, a former member of xAI’s technical staff, accusing him of stealing commerce secrets and techniques to take to a brand new position at OpenAI. Li, who joined xAI in February 2024 and helped develop Grok, allegedly uploaded confidential knowledge earlier than accepting a proposal from OpenAI in August. On Sept. 3, xAI gained a courtroom order briefly blocking Li from beginning the brand new job.
