xAI's organizational structure: Elon Musk's top executives at his ChatGPT AI startup

In February, Musk publicly disowned OpenAI, the company he helped found, after it received its latest multibillion-dollar investment from Microsoft. Musk has since launched xAI with a team of engineers from some of his biggest rivals, including Microsoft and Google. The goal of xAI is to create an AGI, or artificial general intelligence, that can understand the universe. Musk and Sam Altman, the fired CEO of OpenAI, were racing against each other to build a “superintelligent” AI that’s smarter than humans but still aligns with human interest. Musk has recruited Dan Hendrycks, director of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, to advise the startup. Of Musk’s stable of advisors and lieutenants, only Jared Birchall, the former Morgan Stanley banker, is closely involved with xAI. So far. Like everything else Musk touches, that will likely change. Here’s who we know is on the current xAI org chart.

Read an updated version of this story here.

Elon Musk

CEO and founder

Executives

Jared Birchall

CFO
Plays many roles for Musk including managing director of Musk’s family office.

Igor Babuschkin

Member of xAI technical staff. Babuschkin was a member of the technical staff at OpenAI for nearly two years and also worked at DeepMind.

Manuel Kroiss

LinkedIn profile says he’s an xAI cofounder. Used to work at Google and DeepMind.

Yuhuai (Tony) Wu

Former Google research scientist.

Christian Szegedy

Listed as AI researcher and cofounder of xAI. Spent nearly 13 years at Google where he was most recently a staff research scientist.

Toby Pohlen

A founding member of xAI, according to his LinkedIn. Spent more than six years at Google DeepMind where he was most recently a staff research engineer.

Ross Nordeen

“Member of the technical staff,” according to his LinkedIn. Spent nearly four years at Tesla where he was a technical program manager.

Kyle Kosic

A cofounder, according to his LinkedIn. Former member of technical staff for OpenAI.

Greg Yang

Mathematician at xAI. Spent five years with Microsoft research.

Fabio Aguilera-Convers

Member of technical staff at xAI. Spent more than 11 years at Tesla where he was most recently senior manager, data annotation, autopilot.

Xiao Sun

Member of technical staff at xAI. A former staff applied research scientist at Meta.

Guodong Zhang

A member of the technical staff/founding team at xAI. Former research scientist for DeepMind and ex–research intern at Google Brain. Holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, department of computer science.

Zihang Dai

According to his LinkedIn, he’s “technical staff” at xAI. Spent more than three years at Google where he was most recently a research scientist/senior research scientist/staff research scientist.