xAI CFO Mike Liberatore has departed from the company, marking yet another exit from Elon Musk’s AI venture, reported The Wall Street Journal.
Sources told the publication that Liberatore, who had held the CFO position since April, left at the end of July, although the reasons for his departure remain unclear.
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Liberatore, a former executive at Airbnb, played a key role in the company’s fundraising initiatives, which included a $5bn debt issuance facilitated by Morgan Stanley in June 2025.
Alongside this debt, xAI also secured $5bn in equity, with SpaceX contributing nearly half of the total equity raised.
Liberatore was also involved in the expansion of xAI’s data centres in the Memphis region.
He approved the acquisition of an easement for transmission lines adjacent to an inactive power plant in northern Mississippi in mid-July, as per property records.
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By GlobalDataIn August 2025, general counsel Robert Keele announced his exit after just over a year.
Raghu Rao, a senior lawyer responsible for overseeing commercial legal matters at xAI, also left around the same time as Liberatore and Keele, according to the report.
During the same month, Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of xAI and a former member of Google’s DeepMind and OpenAI, announced his decision to leave in order to establish his own venture-capital firm focused on AI safety.
Over the past few years, xAI’s suite of large language models, branded as Grok, has evolved from being a secondary consideration to leading the AI intelligence benchmarks.
Earlier in 2025, xAI merged with the social media platform X, integrating its chatbot into the platform to generate images and responses based on user inquiries.
However, Grok has faced several public malfunctions this year.
In May 2025, the chatbot made posts on X regarding the “white genocide” of non-Black South Africans in response to unrelated questions, and in July, it shared a series of antisemitic comments and violent thoughts about users.
Following these incidents, xAI temporarily disconnected Grok from X and later issued an apology for the chatbot’s erratic behaviour, which had changed after engineers adjusted the model’s parameters to reduce its political correctness.
Linda Yaccarino, the former CEO of X, resigned shortly after these incidents.
