Post model 3 launch, Tesla had a number of senior folks leave almost immediately. My read at that time was they had hit or exceeded pareto-optimal on the suffering:wealth scale —- Tesla was clearly going to make it, and they had already vested 90% of the value they’d receive from Tesla ownership: why go suffer through the massive build out?

And in fact, in that era, Tesla did bring in a bunch of auto industry types to help scale, who as it happens also certainly did very well, but order of magnitude less well than the early peeps.

There might be some similar economics here: change of control will often fully vest early founders. Combined with incoming SX IPO, these guys are done financially — as in, already multibillionaires pre-IPO. You’d have to want to stay and the company would have to really want you to stay as well before it made economic sense to re-up.

People say a lot of things about working for Elon; things like “hardest work I ever did,” and “he made me extremely rich”, but you don’t read “that was easy” very often.

I have no idea if there’s enough talent right now at xAI to go build a foundation model, but in the immortal worlds of Carl Icahn: “don’t bet against Elon”