X’s head of engineering departs

X’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, has suddenly left the company, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.

Wang first joined Elon Musk’s X in July 2023 and has been an integral part of the company’s leadership, often serving as a conduit between Musk and the rest of the company’s engineers. More recently, he was seen internally as X’s defacto head of engineering and product, especially with Musk recently focusing more of his time on xAI and DOGE. It’s unclear why Wang is departing now. Neither he nor a company spokesperson responded to a request for comment in time for publication.

X recently added other engineering leadership: Mike Dalton and Uday Ruddaraju, both previously technical leads at Robinhood, joined in January. Their LinkedIn profiles show that they also work at xAI, which has become increasingly intertwined with X over the last year.

Thanks to the growing profile of xAI and Musk’s newfound political influence, X’s business appears to be turning around. The company reportedly just obtained a $44 billion valuation from investors — the same price Musk paid for Twitter in 2022. While Musk remains an avid poster on X, his attention and leadership at X has become increasingly split since he started campaigning for President Donald Trump last summer.

When Musk first purchased Twitter, he vowed to transform it into an “everything app” akin to China’s WeChat. The Verge previously reported an internal X meeting where Musk said that it “would blow my mind” if the company couldn’t handle “someone’s entire financial life” by the end of 2024. Those plans haven’t come to fruition, though my sources say that work is still underway to launch the X Money payments platform (it’s slated to come “later this year”).