On April 9, according to an internal memo seen by Business Insider, as space giant SpaceX prepares for its blockbuster IPO, Elon Musk’s xAI is undergoing further deep integration with the company, and the artificial intelligence company’s engineering team is undergoing another major reorganization.
SpaceX executive Michael Nichols stated that the company is “significantly behind” in the competition and is taking steps to catch up as quickly as possible.
Sources familiar with the matter revealed that Nichols, currently the senior vice president of SpaceX’s Starlink division, has also assumed the role of president of xAI.
SpaceX acquired xAI earlier this year, and some reports indicate that it is expected to file for an IPO this year, with a valuation potentially exceeding $2 trillion (IT Home note: approximately 13.74 trillion RMB at the current exchange rate).
During its integration with SpaceX, xAI has been closely following AI competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, while simultaneously experiencing a series of organizational upheavals. Several co-founders and executives have left the company, most recently Ross Nordin, one of Musk’s former most trusted lieutenants. Now, Musk is adopting Tesla’s management model, completely rebuilding the company, even amidst ongoing departures and layoffs. This is of great importance: xAI is aiming for an IPO, with a potential valuation in the trillions of dollars.
Devendra Chaplot, who joined xAI last month, previously worked at Facebook and Thinking Machines Labs. He will be responsible for model pre-training, the initial stage where AI models learn general patterns from massive amounts of data such as text, images, and code.
Amman Madan will oversee model factory and tool development, including the infrastructure, data pipelines, and training workflows used to research and optimize AI models. Aditya Gupta will be responsible for post-training and reinforcement learning, the final optimization stage of the model, including fine-tuning, aligning with human preferences, and adapting to real-world applications such as chat and programming assistance.
Beibin Li, who previously worked at Microsoft and Meta, will be responsible for post-training related to Grok code. Xuhui Jia and Yukun Zhu, both formerly at Google DeepMind, will jointly lead video and image training.
The company’s product team will be led by Andrew Milledge and Jason Ginsburg. The two engineers joined xAI in March from AI programming tools company Cursor. Their product team will oversee Grok master models, Grok speech, and Grok image generation.
Physical infrastructure is managed by Jack Palmer; according to LinkedIn, computing infrastructure is overseen by Daniel Douri, SpaceX’s director of software engineering. Several other SpaceX employees have also joined xAI in management roles: Matt Monsen, SpaceX’s director of Starlink software, will also be responsible for xAI’s data operations.
In a memo, Nichols stated that xAI’s computing team’s training performance was “awkwardly low,” and the company plans to significantly improve this metric within the next two months.
Nichols indicated in an internal memo that these personnel changes are effective immediately, and the company is developing more relevant job titles for employees.
This is Musk’s first restructuring of xAI since its acquisition by SpaceX in February. Since January, eight engineers who co-founded xAI with Musk have left the company, including co-founders Nordin and Guodong Zhang, Manuel Cross, who led the Grok code project, and Toby Pollan, who assisted in the development of the AI agent project Macrohard.
Following the departure of several co-founders, the company’s structure has been in constant flux, with Musk sometimes directly managing dozens of subordinates. Sources say that engineers from Tesla and SpaceX have also moved into xAI’s Palo Alto office to assist with the restructuring.
Business Insider previously reported that dozens of employees have left xAI since February. Earlier this year, the company laid off parts of the teams responsible for the video image generation tool Grok Imagine and the AI agent project Macrohard. According to sources, the company recently laid off several more members of its hiring team.
In March of this year, Musk stated on the X platform, “xAI was not built the right way initially, so it’s being completely rebuilt from the ground up.” He also mentioned that the company is reconnecting with previous xAI job seekers and recruiting new talent. Musk wrote on X, “Over the past few years, many talented people haven’t received offers from xAI, or even had an interview.”
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