Bezos's Project Prometheus Hires xAI Co-Founder as Musk Loses Entire Founding Team

Kyle Kosic, who co-founded Elon Musk's xAI and built the infrastructure behind its Colossus supercomputer, has left OpenAI to join Jeff Bezos's secretive AI startup Project Prometheus, the Financial Times reported Monday. Kosic will work on AI infrastructure projects at Prometheus, which is developing systems designed to understand the physical world rather than generate text. His hire lands as the last of Musk's 11 xAI co-founders have walked out the door, with eight departing in under three months.

From Colossus to the factory floor

Kosic's path traces the fault lines of the 2026 AI talent market. He helped launch xAI alongside Musk in 2023, then led the team that stood up Colossus, a training cluster packed with more than 200,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. He left for OpenAI in 2024. Now he is at Prometheus, the $6.2 billion venture Bezos co-founded last November with former Google X executive Vikram Bajaj, according to people familiar with the matter.

Prometheus has already hired hundreds of staff across San Francisco, London, and Zurich. The company has focused on engineers and researchers with experience building large-scale infrastructure, one person close to its hiring told the FT. It declined to comment.

Eleven for zero

Kosic was the first xAI co-founder to leave. Not the most prominent. But his landing spot illustrates where the talent is flowing.

All 11 researchers Musk recruited to start xAI in 2023 are gone. The cascade accelerated after SpaceX acquired xAI in February in an all-stock deal valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba left within 48 hours of each other in early February. Toby Pohlen, Zihang Dai, and Guodong Zhang followed. Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, the last two, departed at the end of March, Business Insider first reported.

Musk acknowledged the damage on March 12. "xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up," he posted on X. The admission came weeks after Tesla invested $2 billion in xAI at an approximate $230 billion valuation, a deal that triggered a shareholder lawsuit alleging Musk directed company capital into his own venture. xAI has since hired two developers from the coding startup Cursor, CNBC reported, along with Devendra Chaplot from Mistral AI, according to FinTech Weekly.

The departures land at a loaded moment. SpaceX dropped a confidential IPO filing on April 1. Bloomberg reported the company has since floated a valuation north of $2 trillion in early conversations with investors. The AI story sits at the heart of that pitch. And the people who built the AI are gone.

A Berkshire Hathaway for factories

Prometheus sits on the opposite end of the AI spectrum from the chatbot race. The company envisions models trained on domain-specific data, such as jet engine design, that can understand the laws of physics, one person close to the company told the FT. It claims to have "assembled the largest corpus of data on engineering."

Bezos and Bajaj are leading efforts to raise what the Wall Street Journal described as $100 billion for a "manufacturing transformation vehicle." The fund would acquire equity stakes in companies across aerospace, chipmaking, defense, architecture, and design, then deploy Prometheus's AI and forward-deployed engineers to improve their margins and operations. One person compared the structure to a "Berkshire Hathaway-type holding company."

Even by 2026 standards, that number is enormous. If realized, the fund would match SoftBank's Vision Fund in size. Bezos has been pitching sovereign wealth funds in Singapore and Gulf nations, multiple people familiar with the discussions told the FT.

The gravitational pull of the talent market

What makes the Kosic hire significant is not one engineer changing jobs. It is the direction of the current. The AI talent war has pushed compensation to absurd levels. Meta has thrown around retention packages reportedly worth $300 million over four years to stop its best researchers from walking. OpenAI is hiring. So is DeepMind. So is Anthropic. You do not lose 11 co-founders in under two years because of bad luck.

The AI industry has struggled to build models that understand physical space. Text and code data are abundant. High-quality data representing real-world engineering processes is not. Competitors have turned to video data and simulations. Prometheus is taking a different approach. Buy the companies that generate the data. Embed engineers inside them. Train on the operational reality of factories and design studios, not scraped web pages.

That bet runs counter to the dominant AI narrative, which assumes knowledge work falls first and physical work later. Bezos is wagering the opposite. Whether a startup with no public product and no official statement can deliver on a $100 billion thesis is another question entirely. But the people building it include the engineer who wired Musk's biggest supercomputer. That part is concrete.

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Maria Garcia

Los Angeles

Tech culture and generative AI reporter covering the intersection of AI with digital culture, consumer behavior, and content creation platforms. Focusing on technology's beneficiaries and those left behind by AI adoption. Based in California.