xAI’s legal chief steps down after whirlwind year

Robert Keele said this week that he has kicked As Xai’s head legal after just over a year, saying that he wants to spend more time with his children. In his announcement, Keele also recognized “daylight between our world images” with Baas Elon Musk, who has not commented on the exit of Keele.

“I love my two toddlers and I don’t get to see them enough,” wrote Keele, placing the news on both X and LinkedIn. Despite the fact that he called his time on the AI startup ‘incredible’ and worked with Musk ‘the adventure of your life’, he said he could not drive ‘two horses at the same time – the family and the job’.

The news from Keele led to an outpouring of support on social media from Xai colleagues and parents. When he joined Xai in May 2024 as his first legal head, he had just launched his own, very short fractional legal outfit. “Keele Law had a good run (~ 3 weeks!), But I could not leave a chance to walk legally at Xai,” he wrote at the time and called himself “Failored and insanely happy.”

Keele arrived just before Xai announced a massive series B finance round of $ 6 billion in May 2024, supported by heavy batters such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, which made the company appreciated at $ 24 billion. Shortly thereafter, Xai started to experience rapid growth and took over X, Musk’s social media company in March of this year, in a deal that, said Musk at that time, appreciated Xai to $ 80 billion and X at $ 33 billion.

Before his entrepreneurial tint, Keele had been legal with autonomous aircraft maker Elroy Air and General Counsel in Airbus’s Silicon Valley Innovation Center.

Taking over is Lily Lim, who, before he became a lawyer, was a rocket scientist at NASA, who worked on spacecraft navigation for the project that mapped the Venus surface. At the end of 2024 she joined Xai as a privacy and IP specialist after legal stints at numerous companies and companies such as ServiceNow.

The departure of Keele fits with a constant pattern of executive turnover in Musk’s Empire. X CEO Linda Yaccarino left last month and Tesla recently lost several top managers. Musk – who also has many long -term lieutenants – expects employees to work openly long hours, even if it means Sleeping in the officeAs happened when he took over X, formerly Twitter.

Some newer companies seem to have adopted a similar mentality to run for rivals, including AI Coding Startup Cognition, who wants to reduce his team aggressively. In fact, the CEO recently told employees in an e-mail that he does not believe in balance between work and private life.