On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered xAI employees for an all-hands meeting. Apparently, he wanted to talk about the future of his AI company, and specifically, how it relates to the moon.
According to the New York Times, which reports that overheard the meetingMusk told employees that xAI needed a lunar manufacturing facility, a factory on the moon that would build artificial intelligence satellites and launch them into space via a giant catapult. “You should go to the moon,” he said, according to the Times. The move, he explained, will help xAI tap into more computing power than any rival. “It’s hard to imagine what an intelligence of this scale would think of,” he added, “but it will be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”
What Musk didn’t seem to address clearly was how any of this will be built, or how he plans to reorganize the newly merged xAI-SpaceX entity as it gears toward a potentially historic IPO. He acknowledged, with pride, that the company is in flux. “If you move faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you’re going to be the leader,” he told employees, according to the Times, “and xAI is moving faster than any other company — nobody’s even close.” He added that “when that happens, there are some people who are better suited to the early stages of a company and less suited to the later stages.”
It’s not clear what set everything off, but the timing, regardless of its cause, is curious to say the least. On Monday night, xAI co-founder Tony Wu announced he was leaving. Less than a day later, another xAI co-founder, Jimmy Ba, who reported directly to Musk, said he was also bouncing. This brings the total to six of xAI’s 12 founding members who have now left the new company. The splits have all been characterized as unusual, and with a SpaceX IPO reportedly targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation coming as soon as this summer, everyone involved will be doing very well financially on their way out the door.
The moon itself is a more recent occupation. For most of SpaceX’s 24-year existence, Mars was the end game. Last Sunday, just before the Super Bowl, Musk surprised many by announcing that SpaceX had “shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon,” claiming that a Mars colony would take “20+ years.” The moon, he said, could get there in half a year.
It’s quite a change in direction for a company that has never sent a mission to the moon.
Rational or otherwise, investors seem much more excited about data centers in orbit than about colonies on other planets. (Even for the most patient money in the room, that’s a long time frame.) But for at least one proponent of ventures in xAI who spoke with this editor last year, the lunar ambitions have nothing to do with Wall Street and do not distract from xAI’s core mission. they are inseparable from it.
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The theory, floated by the VC at the time, is that Musk is building toward a single goal from the ground up: the world’s most powerful global model, an AI trained not just on text and images but on proprietary real-world data that no competitor can replicate. Tesla contributes energy systems and road topology. Neuralink offers a window into the brain. SpaceX provides physical and orbital engineering. The Boring Company adds some underground data. Add a moon plant to the mix and you start to see the outline of a very powerful one.
Whether this vision is possible is a very big question. Another is whether it is legal. According to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no nation—and by extension, no corporation—can claim sovereignty over the moon. But a 2015 US law opened a major loophole – while you can’t own the moon, you can own what you mine from it.
As Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of science and technology at Wesleyan University, explained to TechCrunch last month, the distinction is somewhat illusory. “It’s more like saying you can’t own the house, but you can have the floorboards and the beams,” he said. “Because the stuff on the moon it is the moon.”
That legal framework is the scaffolding on which Musk’s lunar ambitions apparently rest, even though not everyone has agreed to play by those rules (China and Russia certainly haven’t). Meanwhile, for now at least, the team that will help him get there continues to shrink.
