Elon Musk has defended the alleged lack of dedicated safety teams at his companies. This comes after a former employee at his AI company, xAI claimed “zero safety” at the firm. In his post, Musk countered the claim by writing: “Because everyone’s job is safety. It’s not some fake department with no power to assuage the concerns of outsiders”. “Tesla has no safety team and is the safest car. SpaceX has no safety team and has the safest rocket. Dragon is what NASA trusts most to fly astronauts,” he further added.The post responds to an article by The Verge detailing xAI’s division into Grok, Coding, Imagine, and Macrohard teams, which triggered a mass exodus of half its cofounders who cited frustrations with “catch-up” progress and Musk’s view of safety as censorship.
“‘Safety is a dead org at xAI.’ ‘There is no safety team on the org chart.’ ‘There is zero safety whaotsever in the company – not in the image [model], not in the chatbot.’ ‘xAI engineers ‘immediately push to prod[uction]. You survive by shutting up and doing what Elon wants,’ the post quoted The verge.
Half of xAI’s founding team left
Last week, two of xAI co-founders – Yuhuai (Tony) Wu and Jimmy Ba resigned from the company. But the exits did not start this year. Infrastructure lead Kyle Kosic left for OpenAI in mid-2024. Google veteran Christian Szegedy followed in February 2025. Igor Babuschkin departed last August to start a venture firm, and Greg Yang left just last month, citing health issues.And it’s not just co-founders. More than half a dozen other researchers have also quietly walked out in recent weeks, according to the Financial Times, thinning out xAI’s already small technical team. According to reports, some staff have complained that xAI’s leaders set unrealistic expectations with Musk on model development, creating pressure that proved hard to live with.
