- Business Insider reviewed a copy of xAI's internal organizational chart.
- Elon Musk's direct reports include Igor Babuschkin, Ross Nordeen, Jimmy Ba, Jared Birchall, and Daniel Rowland.
- The ranks also include former Tesla and Google engineers and Musk's son.
At xAI, Elon Musk has marshaled a workforce that has ballooned by more than 1,000 employees in less than two years as he goes head-to-head with rivals OpenAI and Google.
Business Insider reviewed the company's internal organizational chart to identify and understand the people near the top of the AI venture as of early this year. The chart, which included names, titles, and other information, features former Tesla and Google engineers, Musk's home office manager, and his son.
As CEO, Musk oversees a team of more than 1,200 people. Five employees report directly to the billionaire: xAI founding team members Igor Babuschkin, Ross Nordeen, and Jimmy Ba; longtime Musk aide Jared Birchall; and Daniel Rowland, whose involvement in the company hasn't been previously reported.
A spokesperson for xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk, Ba, Rowland, Birchall, Babuschkin, and Nordeen did not respond to a request for comment.
Here's what we know about Musk's direct reports.
Jimmy Ba
Ba was one of Musk's first hires at xAI. He appeared on a livestream alongside Musk and a handful of other xAI employees when the company unveiled the latest version of Grok in February.
Several of Ba's direct reports joined the company as "Member of Technical Staff" within the past few months, including Pawan Bhandarkar and Satvik Ramaprasad, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Most xAI employees roll up to Ba, including around 900 AI "tutors," the hourly employees who train the company's chatbot, Grok. These workers report to team leads who are overseen by "human data managers." The majority of tutors work remotely, and some work outside the US.
Outside his work at xAI, Ba is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He's part of the Machine Learning Group, faculty from the computer science department who work on various projects involving artificial intelligence. He received his Ph.D. from the school while studying under the Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, who has been referred to as the "godfather of AI."
Daniel Rowland
Rowland joined xAI nearly a year ago and oversees both of xAI's data centers, according to the organizational chart.
The company built its Memphis data center — which Musk has said is the largest in the world, and which the company has said houses more than 200,000 GPUs — in 122 days, a fraction of the time it typically takes to build such a facility. The company also has two other facilities in Memphis, including a wastewater treatment plant and a site that was announced in March. Musk has said the company plans to scale the site, which he has nicknamed "Colossus," to 2 million GPUs in the coming year.
xAI also quietly set up a data center in Atlanta in December that houses about 12,000 GPUs.
Rowland has a team of a few dozen people, including eight direct reports. In January, two of those employees left Tesla's Dojo project, which is focused on building the carmaker's custom supercomputer, to join the data center project, LinkedIn profiles show.
Brent Mayo, a former SpaceX engineer, also reports to Rowland. Mayo has become the face of xAI in Memphis, where he frequently engages with local officials and serves as the senior manager of site builds and infrastructure. Rowland's other direct reports include Alexander Coppess, Andy Kim, Lee Meyer, and Liz Balke.
Rowland's team is primarily based out of Memphis, but he has one employee listed as a data center technician based in Atlanta.
BI was unable to confirm details of Rowland's professional background. A hardware engineer named Daniel Rowland has worked on Tesla's Dojo supercomputer since 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile and internal documentation reviewed by BI.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
Igor Babuschkin
Babuschkin previously worked at Google DeepMind.
Babuschkin manages the most people directly at xAI, with 29 direct reports. One of his team members includes Kai Musk, Elon Musk's son, according to the chart. Musk is listed in xAI's directory as an "Engineering Intern" on the company's "Engineering Strike Team." His involvement with the company has not been previously reported.
When asked about his position at the company, Kai Musk responded from his xAI email address that "this information is incorrect." He declined to comment further and did not respond to follow-up questions.
Babuschkin also oversees members of the company's "xAI Partner" department, including Marko Elez and Aram Moghaddassi, two people who have been connected to Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.
Both previously worked at Musk's X and Neuralink, according to Moghaddassi's LinkedIn profile and an archived version of Elez's LinkedIn profile. Elez was listed as an "active" employee at xAI in February; four days after BI reached out to xAI about his employment, his company email address stopped working.
Other people listed as members of the xAI Partner department under Babuschkin include Aqueel Miqdad and Anton Shevchenko, who both list X as their current employer on LinkedIn.
Jared Birchall
Birchall is listed as an "xAI Partner" on the organizational chart, but he does not report to Babuschkin. His team includes members of the finance, legal, security, and HR teams. His direct reports include Robert Ochoa, the human resources lead; Robert Keele, the legal lead; and Pablo Mendoza, the finance lead.
Birchall, like Rowland, is listed as a remote employee.
The former Morgan Stanley banker also serves as the CEO of Musk's brain chip startup, Neuralink, and he has run Musk's family office for nine years.
Ross Nordeen
Nordeen has no direct reports. He was a technical program manager at Tesla before he joined xAI in 2023, according to an internal Tesla database from December 2021.
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