xAI top lawyer quits after one year citing ‘problem’ with Elon Musk

xAI’s first legal chief, Robert Keele, has left the company after a little more than a year, citing a desire to be more present with his family — and signaling an unspoken clash of values with founder Elon Musk.

“I love my two toddlers and I don’t get to see them enough,” Keele wrote in a post on X and LinkedIn this week. He described his time at xAI as “incredible” and called working with Musk “the adventure of a lifetime,” but admitted he could no longer manage “riding two horses at once, the family and the job.”

Keele also alluded to “daylight between our worldviews,” referring to Musk. Musk hasn’t publicly commented on the exit.

Keele joined xAI in May 2024, just weeks before the company announced a $6 billion Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, which pushed its valuation to $24 billion. That funding marked the start of an aggressive growth phase — culminating in xAI’s acquisition of X earlier this year. The deal, framed as an internal reorganization, implied an $80 billion valuation for xAI and $33 billion for X.