"Thank you Tesla for the opportunity you gave me in the past." "I resigned from xAI today." "Today is my last day at xAI." In just a few words, the AI ​​circle and the car circle were all over the place at the same time. This means that Musk is experiencing a wave of talent departures.On one side is Raj Jagannathan, a 13-year Tesla veteran and vice president in charge of AI Infra.(Raj Jegannathan)Official announcement of resignation.

On the other hand, xAI, a large model company under his name, has left three Lianchuang companies in two days, and many employees have posted letters expressing their resignation, including many Chinese.

Originally, the resignation of Tesla executives was not uncommon in the past two years, but if you look at it in conjunction with a series of events at xAI, it is very unusual.

Musk's core staff resigned on the same day. What happened? ? ?

Tesla has another vice president resigning

Jagannathan recently posted on LinkedIn that he would be leaving Tesla.


He revealed in the article that he had worked at Tesla for 13 years, during which he designed, built and operated the world's largest AI cluster. This work experience is very important to him. He is grateful to his partners who have been with him along the way and to Tesla for giving him the precious opportunity.


What Jagannathan said is not an exaggeration. For him, Tesla can be said to be a watershed in life. Public information shows that Jagannathan is a"Hardcore" programmer, has 23 years of work experience, and can even write Visual Basic(a programming language born in the last century).

He worked in some unknown companies in his early years, and only moved to Tesla from a software company in India in 2012. He is mainly responsible for server development, so that Tesla's data center and network applications can work stably.

In June 2018, Jagannathan was promoted to senior manager of cloud platform and began to lead the cloud platform security and web application security teams. In the following seven years, he served as cloud platform director and senior director. In January last year, he was promoted to vice president, in charge of Tesla's AI Infra and information security work.

It is reported that in addition to leading the technical team, Jagannathan also served as the head of North American sales last year. Because the director in charge resigned at that time, Jagannathan was sent to "put out the fire."

Last year, under Jagannathan’s rule, Tesla’s sales in the United States were not very good, with 589,000 vehicles sold throughout the year, year-on-year.down 7%. Some netizens believe that this is all Jagannathan's fault. Jagannathan is not capable and it is a good thing to replace him.


Some netizens also believe that Jagannathan is a proper "scapegoat".


It is unclear whether Jagannathan's departure is related to his concurrent sales work.

If you focus on Tesla, it is not uncommon for a vice president-level executive like Jagannathan to leave. In the past two years, Tesla has successively left many senior executives, including the former "number two" and senior vice president Drew Baglino.

However, coincidentally, almost at the same time that Jagannathan resigned, several veterans of xAI, another company owned by Musk, also resigned.

Musk suffers mass brain drain

xAI is a large model company founded in July 2023. Its product Grok is currently on Tesla vehicles, and its model performance is in a leading position in the industry.

However, just recently, xAI has lost many core figures. On the day Jagannathan resigned, two senior officials announced their departure from xAI.


One is Simon Zhai, who graduated from Berkeley with a Ph.D. and did research at Google DeepMind before joining xAI.

The other one isWu Yuhuai, co-founder of xAI, was born in Jiande, Hangzhou, in 1995. He graduated with a PhD from the University of Toronto and studied under Hinton, the godfather of AI. He has worked in DeepMind and OpenAI, and his research direction is mathematics and symbolic reasoning. He is regarded by the outside world as the key figure behind Grok's mathematics and logical reasoning capabilities.


Less than 24 hours after Wu Yuhuai announced his resignation, his doctoral supervisor and another xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba also announced that he was also leaving xAI.


Some analysts believe thatThe departure of many core figures at xAI may be related to Musk’s latest capital layout. Musk announced at the beginning of this month that his commercial aerospace company SpaceX has acquired xAI, which will affect the value of options in the hands of xAI’s core members.


However, before the merger of SpaceX and xAI, xAI experienced a brain drain. At the end of January, xAI co-founderYang KeHe posted on social platforms that he suffers from Lyme disease, which has affected his normal life, so he will quit xAI and become an informal consultant.


Earlier, Yifei Zhou also issued an article announcing his resignation. He stated in the article“Six months here is like two years working elsewhere”.


What Yang Ke and Yifei Zhou said when they left their jobs aroused discussion at the time. They believed that xAI work was too powerful and that their resignation was due to personal health reasons.

In addition to wealth and physical factors, some netizens analyzed that some R&D staff resigned because Grok recently used"Controversial Technology".

Amid the divergent opinions from the outside world, Musk, who was surfing at high speed, did not respond. Having just returned his energy to Tesla, he now has a new dream:

Build a city on the moon.


However, judging from a series of recent events, Musk’s dream of chasing the stars and the sea is no longer as attractive as in the past. Some netizens even raised such questions:

Has Musk lost his attraction to genius?