xAI CFO Mike Liberatore Leaves After About 3 Months
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has reportedly seen a string of executive departures, with the latest being its chief financial officer.
Mike Liberatore joined xAI as CFO in April and left at the end of July, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday (Sept. 3), citing unnamed sources.
xAI did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
Liberatore, a former Airbnb executive, was involved in xAI’s fundraising efforts, including a $5 billion debt sale in June, and oversaw the company’s expansion of its data center near Memphis, according to the report.
Liberatore’s departure follows those of xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, who said Aug. 13 he was leaving to start a venture capital firm; xAI General Counsel Robert Keele, who said Aug. 7 that he was leaving to spend more time with his children; and xAI Senior Lawyer Raghu Rao, who left around the same time, the report said.
Babuschkin was with xAI for two years and five months, Keele was with the firm for a year and five months, and Rao was with the company for five months, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
In an Aug. 13 post on social platform X, Babuschkin wrote that “xAI executes at ludicrous speed” and that the company caught up with the frontier of AI despite speculation that the company had arrived too late to the game.
“Catching up to the frontier this quickly hasn’t been easy,” Babuschkin wrote. “It was made possible by everyone’s diehard grit and team spirit.”
Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023. I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed.
Building…
— Igor Babuschkin (@ibab) August 13, 2025
Keele wrote in a post on LinkedIn — together with an image that compared leading legal at xAI to shoveling coal — that it was time to choose between his family and the job and that he didn’t get to see his toddlers enough.
“The job was a dream, the team, incredible,” Keele wrote. “Working with Elon on this tech, at this time, was the adventure of a lifetime. Although there’s daylight between our worldviews, his vision, commitment, and smarts blew me away on the daily.”
It was reported in June that xAI expects to spend $13 billion this year while bringing in revenues of $500 million, a scenario that is common across the AI industry due to the demands of the technology.
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