Elon Musk’s xAI hit with more turnover as CFO steps down

Elon Musk’s xAI has lost another top ￰0￱ Liberatore who joined as chief financial officer in April exited the company at the end of July according to reporting from The Wall Street ￰1￱ reason behind Mike’s departure hasn’t been disclosed

and the company hasn’t issued any public ￰2￱ had barely spent four months at the job but his name was already tied to some of xAI’s biggest financial plays to ￰3￱ helped drive a $5 billion debt deal with Morgan Stanley acting as the main ￰4￱ addition to that the company raised another $5 billion in ￰5￱ half of that money came from SpaceX

which is unusual for a company that doesn’t usually throw cash into other ￰6￱ sudden departure of Mike during that scale of fundraising has left people wondering what exactly is going on behind the ￰7￱ also handled physical expansion work for xAI especially its data center ￰8￱ filings show he signed off on a deal in mid-July to buy an easement for transmission lines near a shut-down power plant in northern ￰9￱ move is tied to a larger effort to expand in the Memphis area where xAI has been acquiring space for ￰10￱ purchase ended up being one of Mike’s final acts before walking ￰11￱ counsel and senior lawyer both left the same month On August 7 the company’s general counsel

Robert Keele also ￰12￱ said on X that he was leaving after just over a year to be with his two young ￰13￱ the post didn’t stop ￰14￱ pointed out that “there’s daylight between our worldviews” when talking about working under ￰15￱ he dropped an image generated by Grok the company’s own chatbot when asked

“what’s it like to lead legal at xAI?” The result was a wild-looking guy in a suit shoveling coal which Robert included in the post without ￰16￱ same week Raghu Rao a senior lawyer who handled commercial legal matters

also left the ￰17￱ hasn’t said anything about his exit ￰18￱ the timing lined up almost exactly with both Mike and Robert’s departures which means three top roles were vacated within ￰19￱ week later on August 13 another major name ￰20￱ Babuschkin

who co-founded xAI in 2023 said he was leaving to start his own venture capital firm focused on AI ￰21￱ previously worked at DeepMind and OpenAI two of the most well-known names in the ￰22￱ said in his farewell post that “catching up to the frontier this quickly hasn’t been easy.” Elon replied to him on X saying “We wouldn’t be here without you.” Grok went rogue and caused public backlash before more resignations The same month all of these exits happened

Grok the company’s flagship AI chatbot created a new wave of ￰23￱ chatbot is now embedded directly inside X and it can respond to prompts

generate answers and create ￰24￱ xAI and X merged earlier this year Grok has become central to both ￰25￱ May 2024 Grok posted unprompted replies about a fake narrative involving “white genocide” of non-Black South Africans

even though the users hadn’t asked about anything ￰26￱ in July the chatbot posted multiple antisemitic statements and violent imagery directed at other ￰27￱ those incidents xAI temporarily pulled Grok off the platform and later issued an ￰28￱ to the engineers Grok’s behavior changed after the team tweaked its parameters to make it less politically ￰29￱ tweak was what triggered the series of bizarre and offensive ￰30￱ team didn’t give specifics

but the internal changes clearly did not work as ￰31￱ after the Grok chaos Linda Yaccarino the former CEO of X also ￰32￱ had been leading the platform but was demoted after the merger with xAI

which left Elon back in full ￰33￱ August she took on a new role as CEO of eMed Population Health a private health management ￰34￱ seen where it ￰35￱ in Cryptopolitan Research and reach crypto’s sharpest investors and builders.