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Meet the Chinese AI star who splashed a reported US$70m on a California mansion

Tony Wu Yuhuai, the China-born co-founder of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence lab, sparked discussions across Chinese social media after reportedly spending US$70 million on a…

By Samantha Johnson / August 18, 2026
Tony Wu Yuhuai, the China-born co-founder of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence lab, sparked discussions across Chinese social media after reportedly spending US$70 million on a six-bedroom Californian mega-mansion.
The property deal, the largest so far this year in the Bay Area, pushed the thirty-something AI star under the spotlight, alongside other Silicon Valley-based Chinese talent that has contributed to frontier AI labs from OpenAI to Meta Platforms.

Wu appeared to be the buyer of a 12-acre (4.8 hectare) estate in Hillsborough, an affluent area in California close to Silicon Valley, according to a report by The San Francisco Standard last week.

The luxury estate features a private nine-hole golf course, a 150-seat outdoor amphitheatre and a 2,100-gallon saltwater aquarium among other amenities, according to the report.

Wu, who left xAI earlier this year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.

In 2023, Wu co-founded xAI, now renamed as SpaceXAI, after his stint at Google as a research scientist from 2021. Before that, Wu interned at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind team as a research scientist.
During his time at xAI, Wu was one of the 12 members of the founding team alongside Musk, and a core developer of the chatbot Grok, with a focus on AI mathematics and building machines that can reason. He previously grabbed media attention in 2025 when he sat next to Musk during a live-streamed launch of the firm’s chatbot Grok 3.

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