X’s engineering chief abruptly left the company while Musk was busy with other projects

While Elon Musk is immersed in the xAI project and his work at the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), key employees are leaving the social network X. The head of engineering, Haofei Wang, has unexpectedly left his position, The Verge reports.

Image Source: Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash

Wang joined the company in 2023 and served as a liaison between its engineers and owner Musk. In recent months, he has effectively served as X’s head of engineering and product, especially as Musk has focused on his other projects, xAI and DOGE. The reasons for Wang’s departure remain unclear at this time. Neither he nor the company has responded to requests for comment.

X is starting to see some personnel changes. In January, Mike Dalton and Uday Ruddaraju, formerly technical at financial services company Robinhood, joined the engineering team. According to their social media profiles, they also work at xAI.

Meanwhile, xAI’s influence continues to grow, and so does Musk’s political clout. Amid these changes, X’s financial position has gradually improved, and investors recently valued the company at $44 billion, the same price Musk paid for Twitter in 2022. But he’s been paying less and less attention to the company. Things got worse after he began supporting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last summer, and became embroiled in a different kind of trouble.

Recall that when Musk bought Twitter, he promised to turn it into an “app for everything,” similar to China’s WeChat. During one of the internal meetings, he even said that he would be “terribly disappointed” if X could not manage the financial lives of users by the end of 2024.

While those plans have yet to materialize, sources say work on the X Money payment platform is ongoing and is expected to launch later this year.