Manuel Kroiss, known professionally as Makro, has departed xAI, the artificial intelligence company co-founded by Elon Musk. Kroiss was one of the original eleven engineers who joined Musk in 2023 to build the organization. His exit marks the tenth departure among the original co-founding team since the company's inception earlier this year. The other founders who have left include Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang. Kroiss played a critical role at xAI, specifically leading the pretraining efforts essential for training the company's AI models on vast datasets. He reported directly to Musk and collaborated with former co-founder Zhang to enhance xAI's coding capabilities. Before joining xAI, Kroiss worked at Google and DeepMind. Neither xAI nor Kroiss immediately commented on the departure. The rapid turnover has prompted significant structural changes within the company. Musk recently stated that xAI was not initially built correctly and is now being rebuilt from the ground up. This includes Musk taking direct control of managing dozens of employees and integrating staff from his other ventures, Tesla and SpaceX. The organization has also shed dozens of employees during this restructuring. Musk publicly addressed the changes on the X platform, noting that the company is reviewing past candidates, many of whom were previously declined an offer or interview, to bring in fresh talent. He emphasized that xAI is currently behind in coding performance compared to competitors but is working hard to exceed them. Ross Nordeen, who joined from Tesla, remains the only other co-founder besides Musk. In terms of broader business context, SpaceX acquired xAI earlier this year. Reports indicate that the company plans to file for an initial public offering later this year, with valuations potentially reaching $1.5 trillion. The ongoing leadership shifts signal a period of intense transformation as xAI aims to refine its AI models and operational framework to achieve market dominance.