Musk’s Xai lost CFO after 3 months as administrative personnel flow continues to rise
The Wall Street Journal first reported that Mike Liberatore, chief financial officer of XAI, left the company in just three months. His exports have increased the startup’s high-profile turnover. Launched by Musk in 2023, Xai is known for its Grok Chatbot. The company’s technology quickly attracted competitors, but Grok also made headlines for controversial output, now a series of executives.
After eight years at Airbnb, Liberatore joined XAI in April, where he is vice president of finance and corporate development. He has also worked at PayPal and eBay. At XAI, he was involved in fundraising and overseeing data center expansion in Memphis, Tennessee, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Around the same time, Xai’s former commercial protagonist, Raghu Rao, also left. Rao joined in April after taking roles on Zoom, Ernst & Young and Deloitte.
This summer, Robert Keele, a member of the XAI legal team, left his role as general counsel. “Currently, using this technology with Elon is a lifelong adventure,” Kiel wrote in his August 5 post, saying he is going to spend more time with his family. His farewell included a peculiar videotape in which a man in a suit shoveled coal, Keel said the chatbot’s response to the prompt was: “What’s it like to lead the law on XAI?”
Musk established Xai in just a few years, mainly drawn by a founding team from Openai and Google. Of the dozen co-founders, at least three have left. Kyle Kosic is now in Openai, while Christian Szegedy becomes the chief scientist at Morph Labs. Both left last year.
The recently exited co-founder is Igor Babushkin, who led the company’s engineering team and then left in August to set up his own venture capital firm focusing on AI startups and agency systems. “We wouldn’t be here without you,” Musk said in an August 13 article.
Not every departure is very kind. Last month, Xai filed a lawsuit against Xuechen Li, a former member of Xai’s technology team, accusing him of stealing trade secrets and taking on a new role in Openai. Li joined XAI in February 2024 and helped develop Grok, allegedly uploading confidential data before accepting OpenAI’s offer in August. On September 3, Xai won a court order to temporarily prevent Li from starting a new job.
