Eleven Names, One Center
What happens to a powerful institution when the people most capable of disagreeing with its leader become the people least likely to remain inside it?
By late March 2026, xAI had an answer, if not an intentional one. All eleven engineers who had co-founded the company with Elon Musk in 2023 — among them Jimmy Ba, co-author of the most-cited optimization paper in the history of machine learning, and Igor Babuschkin, recruited from Google DeepMind to serve as chief engineer — had left. The exodus wasn’t sudden. Christian Szegedy went first, in February 2025.
The cascade proper began a year later: Tony Wu announced his departure on February 10, 2026; Jimmy Ba resigned within twenty-four hours, reportedly amid disputes over how hard the models should be pushed. By mid-March only two of the original eleven remained. Within weeks, both were gone too (Reuters, 2026).
The timing wasn’t incidental. That same February, Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, absorbed xAI in an all-stock deal that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, ahead of a planned public offering (Reuters, 2026). Outside auditors — Musk’s own word was “fixers” — were brought in from SpaceX and Tesla to review the AI division’s work. Musk’s public explanation was that xAI had not been “built right the first time around” and was now being reconstructed “from the foundations up.”
What’s harder to settle than who left is what, exactly, remains once they’re gone — and whether a structure this efficient at removing friction has also, in the same motion, removed whatever was capable of correcting it from the inside.
Three thousand years earlier, a household in the hill country faced the same question with a different unit of measurement: not resignations, but a single stone.
The Instrument That Turned
Paris, 1794. Maximilien Robespierre had spent the previous year teaching the National Convention a simple lesson: hesitation to condemn a colleague was itself grounds for suspicion. Old allies went first — Danton, who had helped found the Revolution alongside him, was executed that spring on charges Robespierre had personally helped build. By summer, Robespierre had eliminated nearly every faction capable of checking him, which turned out to be the problem rather than the solution. He had built a machine with no setting for mercy, and no exception clause for its builder. On the 9th of Thermidor, delegates who had watched colleague after colleague make the same walk turned on him before he could turn on them. He was guillotined the next day, without the trial he had insisted his own victims receive.1
The instrument built to eliminate rivals became, almost mechanically, the instrument that eliminated the man who built it.
It’s worth being precise about what kind of claim that is, and what kind it isn’t. Robespierre’s rivals died. Abimelech’s brothers died, on a single stone, in a single afternoon. xAI’s co-founders resigned, were reorganized out of their roles, or simply found themselves no longer in the room — nobody was killed. These are not the same event wearing different costumes. They are the same structural temptation, showing up at radically different levels of severity: physical elimination, political elimination, organizational displacement. What connects them isn’t the method. It’s the belief, at the center of each, that the surest way to secure a position is to reduce the number of people positioned to challenge it.
Judges 9 is where that belief gets its oldest recorded test.
Seventy Brothers, Three Trees
Gideon had just refused a throne Israel offered him outright — that’s where Judges 8 ends. His son did not inherit the impulse.
Abimelech, born to a concubine in Shechem, went to his mother’s family with a direct proposal: better one ruler than seventy. Shechem gave him silver from the temple of Baal-berith, and Scripture doesn’t soften what the silver purchased.
“And he went unto his father’s house at Ophrah, and slew his brethren the sons of Jerubbaal, being threescore and ten persons, upon one stone: notwithstanding yet Jotham the youngest son of Jerubbaal was left; for he hid himself.” (Judges 9:5, KJV)
Jotham escapes by hiding, and it’s Jotham who delivers the chapter’s strangest passage — a fable, shouted down from Mount Gerizim at the men who crowned his brother. The trees, he says, once went looking for a king. They asked the olive tree, which refused: it had oil to give, oil that honors God and man, and no interest in trading that for a throne. They asked the fig, which refused for the same reason — it already had sweetness to produce. They asked the vine, which refused because it already had wine that cheers both God and man. Only then did they ask the bramble, the one plant in the field with no fruit and nowhere useful to be. The bramble said yes.
What the fable actually distinguishes isn’t bravery from cowardice. The olive, the fig, and the vine don’t refuse the crown because leadership is beneath them — they refuse because they already know what they’re for. Their fruit is the answer to the only question a crown could otherwise supply. The bramble has no such answer waiting. It needs the throne to become someone, in a way the fruit-bearing trees simply don’t.
“And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow: and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.” (Judges 9:15, KJV)
A bramble has no shade to offer — that’s the joke folded inside its own threat. But look again and it isn’t only that the promise is empty. It’s a promise of shelter from something that, structurally, cannot shelter anything. Authority is safest when it is held by someone who can imagine life without it — Gideon could, and said so in the chapter just before this one. Abimelech evidently could not, and neither, the fable suggests, could the bramble.
The People Left to Say No
Three years after buying Abimelech his crown, the men of Shechem turned on him — backing a rival, Gaal, who arrived practically inviting the confrontation. Abimelech burned the city that had financed him and marched on to besiege Thebez, where the story ends the way it began: with someone he hadn’t accounted for.
Shechem’s mistake wasn’t naivety about Abimelech’s character. It was a transaction they thought they understood: silver for protection. What they got instead was a different exchange entirely — silver bought them a ruler whose only real qualification was usefulness to himself, which meant their own usefulness to him was the whole of their standing. The moment that usefulness ran out, so did the arrangement.
Modern political science has a name for the mechanism Abimelech was running on instinct: coup-proofing — a leader systematically removing anyone with independent standing to challenge him, trading institutional loyalty for loyalty that has to be continually repurchased. The term is modern. The temptation, evidently, isn’t.2 Researchers studying the pattern keep finding the same paradox: it tends to produce the opposite of security. The danger begins not when one person leads, but when an institution can no longer function without one person — because that is precisely the point at which nothing independent is left standing to notice trouble before it becomes a wall collapsing on someone’s head.
None of this requires predicting what happens next at xAI. Nine of eleven original co-founders leaving a company within two years of its founding is not proof the company is now weak — Musk may well be right that reconstruction from the center produces something faster and sharper than eleven independent builders ever could have. That’s a real argument, and speed is a real advantage. What the departures do raise, honestly, is a narrower question: what kind of institution is being built once its most independent people are also its first to leave. A healthy institution does not merely need useful people. It needs people who are useful enough to disagree — and that is a different capacity than loyalty, however loyalty is purchased.
Shechem could have kept the olive tree’s oil, or the fig’s sweetness, or the vine’s wine, in the form of leaders who had something to lose and therefore something to protect. It chose the one applicant with nothing to lose in a fire it started.
The Sentence He Could Not Write
In the previous installment, Gideon stood at the edge of the same offer and walked away from it — the last time this series will get to call a refusal of power the easy case. Judges 9 is what happens when the household he left behind produces someone who doesn’t share the impulse, and it’s worth asking, plainly, whether every refusal in this book is automatically the wiser move, or whether sometimes the olive tree’s caution simply leaves the field open to whatever is willing to take it.
Have we ever preferred the person who needed us to the person capable of telling us we were wrong? Shechem did, for three years, before the silver it spent came due in a currency it hadn’t priced in.
Abimelech’s reign ends at the wall of Thebez, where a woman he never accounted for drops a millstone and cracks his skull. His last order is to his armor-bearer: finish it with a sword, so history won’t record that a woman brought him down. Scripture takes the request and, in the very next clause, does exactly what he was trying to prevent. He could command silver, mercenaries, a burning city. He still couldn’t write the sentence about his own death.
1 On the chronology and mechanism of the Terror, see Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (Henry Holt, 2006).
2 On coup-proofing and its tendency to increase rather than reduce a leader’s vulnerability, see Erica De Bruin, How to Prevent Coups d’État: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival (Cornell University Press, 2020).
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