On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered the employees of xAI for an all-hands meeting. He wanted to discuss the future of his AI company, specifically its relationship to the moon. According to a report, Musk told employees that xAI needs a lunar manufacturing facility. This factory on the moon would build AI satellites and launch them into space using a giant catapult. “You have to go to the moon,” he said. He explained that this move would allow xAI to harness more computing power than any rival. “It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about,” he added, “but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”
What Musk did not clearly address was how any of this would be built, or how he plans to reorganize the newly merged xAI and SpaceX entity. This merger is simultaneously careening toward a potentially historic initial public offering. He did acknowledge that the company is in a state of flux. “If you’re moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you will be the leader,” he told employees, “and xAI is moving faster than any other company — no one’s even close.” He added that some people are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages.
The timing of the all-hands meeting is curious. On Monday night, xAI co-founder Tony Wu announced his departure. Less than a day later, another co-founder, Jimmy Ba, also said he was leaving. That brings the total to six of xAI’s 12 founding members who have now left the young company. The splits have been described as amicable. With a SpaceX IPO reportedly targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation as soon as this summer, everyone involved stands to do very well financially on their way out.
The moon itself is a more recent preoccupation for Musk. For most of SpaceX’s 24-year existence, Mars was the end goal. This past Sunday, just before the Super Bowl, Musk posted that SpaceX had “shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon.” He argued that a Mars colony would take over 20 years, while a moon colony could be achieved in half that time. This is a significant change in direction for a company that has never sent a mission to the moon.
Investors seem considerably more excited about data centers in orbit than about colonies on other planets, given the extremely long timeline for the latter. However, to at least one venture backer in xAI, the lunar ambitions are not a distraction from the company’s core mission; they are inseparable from it. The theory is that Musk has been building toward a single goal: the world’s most powerful AI model, trained on proprietary real-world data no competitor can replicate. Tesla contributes energy systems and road data. Neuralink offers brain data. SpaceX provides physics and orbital mechanics. The Boring Company adds subsurface data. A moon factory would contribute to this powerful outline.
Whether that vision is achievable is a very big question. Another is whether it is legal. Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no nation or company can claim sovereignty over the moon. But a 2015 U.S. law opened a significant loophole: while you cannot own the moon, you can own whatever you extract from it. As one professor explained, 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,” she said. “Because the stuff that is in the moon is the moon.”
That legal framework is the scaffolding for Musk’s moon ambitions, even though not all nations have agreed to those rules. Meanwhile, as the team that was supposed to help him get there keeps getting smaller, it is unclear who will be helping him on this adventure or whether his latest all-hands meeting answered more questions than it raised.