The chief financial officer of Elon Musk’s xAI reportedly left the company after just a few months on the job – the latest in a series of high-profile executive exits that have thinned out its ranks.
Mike Liberatore, a former executive at Airbnb, left the CFO post in July, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
He had only held the C-suite gig since April.
The reasons for Liberatore’s exit from xAI were not immediately clear, according to the outlet.
He had reportedly played a key role in xAI’s recent fundraising efforts as well as the artificial intelligence firm’s plans to build out data centers in the greater Memphis area.
Musk, who is known for discussing the inner workings of his companies on X, has yet to address Liberatore’s exit.
The departure appears to have occurred around the same time that Linda Yaccarino abruptly announced her resignation as CEO of X, which became a subsidiary of xAI after Musk combined the entities earlier this year.
Yaccarino did not specify the reasons for her July exit, though it came shortly after X was forced to disable text responses from its “Grok” AI chatbot after it began referring to itself as “Mecha-Hitler” and espousing pro-Nazi views.
A source close to the situation told The Post that Yaccarino’s departure had been in the works for over a week before it was announced and was unrelated to the Grok meltdown.
She has since taken a role as CEO of the digital health firm eMed Population Health.
Meanwhile, xAI’s general counsel Robert Keele stepped down last month after slightly more than a year in the role.
In a farewell note he shared on X and LinkedIn, Keele said he wanted to spend more time with his two toddlers.
Keele called his stint at xAI the “adventure of a lifetime” and praised Musk for his “vision, commitment and smarts,” even as he acknowledged that there was “daylight between our worldviews.”
Elsewhere, Igor Babushkin, a leading AI researcher who cofounded xAI alongside Musk in 2023, said in August that he was leaving to start his own investment firm dedicated to AI safety.
Another xAI lawyer, Raghu Rao, also recently left the company, according to the Journal.
Musk’s merger valued X at $33 billion and xAI at $80 billion. XAI directly competes with top AI firms, including Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Google.
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