Musk Follow Tracker — Issue #17: The Departed Co-founder Gets the Cut

Window: May 30 UTC | Changes: 1 unfollow, 0 new follows | Running count: ~1,350

At 16:32 UTC on May 30, Musk unfollowed @Guodzh — Guodong Zhang, one of xAI's 11 original technical co-founders. 1

Zhang's last day at xAI was March 13, 2026. He had been a key technical leader reporting directly to Musk, responsible for Grok Imagine, Grok's video generation tools, Grok's coding agent, and image generation infrastructure. 2 His departure came during the most concentrated founder exodus in xAI's three-year history — nine of the original 11 technical co-founders had left by late March.

The unfollow arrived 79 days after that March 13 exit.

Zhang has stayed active and visible in the AI field. On May 5 he retweeted the launch of RadixArk, a new AI startup that raised $100M seed at a $400M valuation — a former xAI colleague's venture. 3 On May 10 he was attending AI investor events (Decagon/Accel), joking about "xAI time" not rusting his poker skills. 4 On May 23 he was engaging with ML training research about data duplication. 5

His current bio reads: "Maybe the real AGI was the friends we made along the way."

He appears to be scouting the post-xAI AI landscape without having announced a new company or role publicly. The investor events and ML commentary suggest he's either advising, fundraising, or evaluating options.

The timing matters. During Zhang's tenure, Musk continued following him — the follow survived Zhang's March 13 departure, survived the broader xAI founder exodus, and persisted for over two months. The May 30 unfollow is therefore a deliberate act rather than house-cleaning, because that house-cleaning would have happened at the time of exit.

Two readings are plausible:

Competitive positioning: Zhang is circulating in the AI investor and founder circuit, attending events and almost certainly discussing new ventures. If he ends up co-founding or joining an AI lab competing with xAI on coding agents or video generation — precisely the areas he built at xAI — the unfollow may be Musk drawing a line ahead of public announcement.

Workflow signal: Multiple other xAI co-founders departed between February and March 2026, and Musk appears to have maintained follow relationships with some of them. Zhang was blamed by reports for delays in Grok coding capabilities and had his primary responsibilities removed before he chose to leave. 6 The unfollow could simply be a late administrative clean-up of that specific professional relationship, without a forward-looking trigger.

The 79-day delay argues against a simple cleanup — if anything, it argues that something specific prompted the cut now, rather than in March.

Issue #16 left @BrentM_BuildGuy's identity open. He is Brent Mayo, xAI's Memphis compute infrastructure lead. 7 Mayo has been publicly running the Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 supercomputer builds in Memphis, described the Colossus 2 expansion as "copying and pasting" the Colossus 1 playbook, and has appeared in xAI hiring posts and Musk's Memphis visits. The SpaceX S-1 highlighted xAI's fast and cheap data center build-out as a key competitive advantage — that narrative runs through Mayo's team. Musk following the person running the physical compute layer, 13 days before the IPO roadshow, fits the same pre-roadshow relationship-building pattern as the Lynn Martin (NYSE President) follow in Issue #16.

On May 29, Bloomberg reported that SpaceX has lowered its IPO valuation target to at least $1.8 trillion, down from an earlier goal above $2 trillion. 8 Formal investor marketing could begin as early as June 4, with pricing around June 11 and trading on June 12 under ticker SPCX on Nasdaq. A fundraising target of up to $75 billion would still make it the largest IPO in history. The $1.8T floor implies a price cut of at least $200B from prior expectations, likely a response to investor pushback on the multiple versus the 2025 net loss of $4.94 billion (down from a $791M profit in 2024).

The revised timeline is consistent with the follow patterns over the past two weeks: Lynn Martin (NYSE, May 29), Brent Johnsen — SpaceX CFO (May 23), Duncan Penn (SpaceX top shareholder, May 25), Jon Shulkin (former xAI CRO/Valor Equity, May 25) all cluster in the 10-day window before the roadshow window opens.

Running follow count: ~1,350 (net -1 from Issue #16's ~1,351)

Open issues: Issue #8 ghost unfollow still unresolved. @ddueri0 identity still unresolved.