Tony Yuhuai Wu, a co-founder of Elon Musk's xAI, has reportedly purchased a mansion in Hillsborough, California, for approximately US$70 million, or roughly Rs. 670 crore. The acquisition would make it one of the most expensive residential property sales in California this year.
The estate, known as Villa de Verano, spans 12 acres and includes six bedrooms. Its amenities include a nine-hole private golf course, a 150-seat outdoor amphitheatre and a saltwater aquarium with a 2,100-gallon capacity. Wu has not publicly confirmed the purchase. The report of the sale first emerged via the South China Morning Post, which noted the deal has drawn attention on Chinese social media.
Academic and early career background
Wu completed a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the University of New Brunswick in 2015, followed by a PhD in machine learning at the University of Toronto, which he completed in 2021. His doctoral adviser was Jimmy Ba, an AI researcher who went on to become part of the founding team at xAI.
Before joining xAI, Wu held internships at OpenAI and Google DeepMind. He then joined Google as a research scientist in 2021.
Role at xAI
Wu became one of the founding members of xAI in 2023, the company Musk established to build advanced AI systems. At xAI, his work centred on AI mathematics and machine reasoning, and he was involved in the development of the company's chatbot, Grok. He gained broader public visibility in 2025 when he appeared alongside Musk during the livestreamed unveiling of Grok 3.
Wu left xAI in February this year, shortly after SpaceX acquired the company in a transaction that valued SpaceX at US$1 trillion and xAI at US$250 billion. Announcing his exit on X, Wu said it was "time for my next chapter," adding that a small team equipped with AI tools could "move mountains and redefine what's possible."
Wu, who was born in Hangzhou and moved to Canada during high school, is among a number of China-born researchers who have taken up senior roles at major AI companies including OpenAI and Meta, in addition to xAI. According to data from the MacroPolo Global AI Talent Tracker, researchers from China made up about 38 percent of top-tier AI researchers working in the US in 2022, marginally ahead of US-origin researchers at 37 percent.
