Silicon Valley tech startups live by the motto “Move fast and break things.”
Elon Musk has brought this ethos to all his companies, to varying degrees of success.
Between SpaceX, Tesla, Boring Co., Neuralink, and xAI, Musk has maintained a consistent management style. But when he entered Twitter’s San Francisco offices with a literal sink in his hands, Musk may have signaled that he would handle what would become X a little more loosely.
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On the front end, Musk uses X to opine on issues of the day, which has proven to cost Tesla customers, market share, and brand loyalty.
But behind the scenes, he has been even more mercurial.
X Corp. CEO Linda Yaccarino announced her resignation in July after just two years at the company.
X and xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, merged on March 28, 2025, just weeks before Yaccarino left.
Since then, the combined company has seen several other high-profile departures as well.
On Wednesday, the exodus continued.
Image source: Getty Images/Variety/Penske Media
xAI CFO leaves months after joining company
Earlier this summer, xAI Chief Financial Officer Mike Liberatore quietly left the company shortly after joining in April.
Liberatore left xAI at the end of July, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources.
Formerly an Airbnb executive, Liberatore was “involved with the company’s fundraising efforts,” according to the report, and participated in the $5 billion debt sale that Morgan Stanley helped orchestrate in June.
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Liberatore also oversaw some of xAI’s data-center expansion in the Memphis area, among other duties for the company.
But just weeks after taking the job, he joined Yaccarino as an ex-employee — and he isn’t the only one.
Executives who have left xAI recently
- Last month, xAI lost its general counsel, Robert Keele, who announced he was stepping down after a little over a year on the job to spend more time with his family.
- Raghu Rao, another senior lawyer who oversaw the company’s commercial legal affairs, left around the same time as Liberatore and Keele, according to the Journal.
- Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of xAI, announced his departure on August 13.
xAI competition has the upper hand in the AI race
While OpenAI started the modern artificial intelligence race with the release of ChatGPT, the field has become extremely crowded since then.
Anthropic, Samba Nova, Scale AI, and Databricks are just a few of the companies that have eclipsed $1 billion in funding like OpenAI and xAI. Databricks’ $19 billion in funding even eclipses xAI’s $12 billion, according to Forbes.
OpenAI far and away leads the pack with nearly $64 billion in funding.
Meanwhile, Gemini has the backing of one of the biggest names in tech, Alphabet.
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