Musk’s xAI Names Former Rocket Scientist New Legal Affairs Head

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has a new head of legal affairs in Lily Lim, who before embarking on a legal career was a rocket scientist at NASA.

Lim, a product and privacy legal specialist at the company since late last year, touted her promotion this week via LinkedIn. She moves into a head legal role previously held by Robert Keele, who joined xAI as its top lawyer in May 2024. Keele confirmed his departure in statements posted to both LinkedIn and X, the social media service formerly known as Twitter that Musk acquired in 2022.

“I love my two toddlers and I don’t get to see them enough. The job was a dream, the team, incredible,” Keele said. “Working with Elon on this tech, at this time, was the adventure of a lifetime. Although there’s daylight between our worldviews, his vision, commitment, and smarts blew me away on the daily.”

Keele and Lim didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Musk announced this year that X and xAI would combine operations in an all-stock deal creating a new company called xAI Holdings. That company has reportedly held fundraising talks that would value it at roughly $200 billion, with Musk’s electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc. potentially making an investment in it. Musk said last month that Tesla shareholders will vote on the matter.

Keele, a former general counsel and compliance head for Airbus SE’s Silicon Valley incubator, has a successor also familiar with the aerospace industry. Lim was once a spacecraft navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she worked on the Magellan Project that mapped the surface of Venus.

She started her legal career at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati before becoming a cybersecurity and intellectual property partner at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner. Lim then went on to in-house roles at ServiceNow Inc. and industrial conglomerate Fortive Corp., where she was head of IP, software, and AI legal strategy prior to joining xAI in late 2024.

At the time, xAI hired another former Fortive lawyer, Lady Rejane Cohen-Frey, as a senior privacy and data protection consultant. The company also added employment counsel Mary Wang, who had been a partner at California-based boutique Hixson Nagatani, and product and privacy counsel Daniel Ligman from software company Okta Inc., where he was a senior corporate counsel.

Ben Garcia, a former senior counsel for trust and risk at cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global Inc., recently joined xAI in a commercial legal role.

X, which hired litigator Adam Mehes from Tesla two years ago to help rebuild a law department gutted in the wake of Musk’s $44 billion Twitter takeover, didn’t respond to a comment request. Nor did Mehes.

Mehes and other lawyers at X have used social media to recruit lawyers to the company, which sometimes uses them to litigate matters directly in lieu of outside counsel. X hired former Sullivan & Cromwell associate Christopher Guerriero in March as a senior litigation counsel. X has also brought on Laura Yens, a former general counsel at online lender LendingTree Inc., to be head of legal for X Money, a payments system and digital wallet.

X recently recruited Western Union Co.’s chief compliance officer C. Rob DeCampos to be head of payments compliance, while also hiring Eunjung Park as a senior legal counsel for payments from Klarna Group PLC.

Keele, xAI’s now former top lawyer, also used social media for legal recruiting.

“The hours are long, but the xAI camaraderie is strong, and the tech is revolutionary,” Keele once said. “Salary is decent; equity is compelling,” he wrote in another message. “I can promise you won’t have a single dull day.”