On Tuesday evening, Elon Musk gathered the staff of xAI for an all-hands assembly. Evidently, he wished to speak about the way forward for his AI firm, and particularly, the way it pertains to the moon.
In accordance with The New York Occasions, which studies that it heard the meeting, Musk informed staff that xAI wants a lunar manufacturing facility, a manufacturing unit on the moon that may construct AI satellites and fling them into house through a large catapult. “It’s a must to go to the moon,” he stated, per the Occasions. The transfer, he defined, will assist xAI harness extra computing energy than any rival. “It’s tough to think about what an intelligence of that scale would take into consideration,” he added, “nevertheless it’s going to be extremely thrilling to see it occur.”
What Musk didn’t seem to handle clearly was how any of this might be constructed, or how he plans to reorganize the newly merged xAI-SpaceX entity that’s concurrently careening towards a doubtlessly historic IPO. He did acknowledge, proudly, that the corporate is in flux. “In case you’re shifting quicker than anybody else in any given know-how area, you can be the chief,” he informed staff, per the Occasions, “and xAI is shifting quicker than another firm — nobody’s even shut.” He added that “when this occurs, there’s some people who find themselves higher fitted to the early levels of an organization and fewer fitted to the later levels.”
It isn’t clear what prompted the all-hands, however the timing, no matter its trigger, is no less than curious. On Monday evening, xAI co-founder Tony Wu introduced he was leaving. Lower than a day later, one other xAI co-founder, Jimmy Ba, who reported on to Musk, stated he was bouncing, too. That brings the whole to 6 of xAI’s 12 founding members who’ve now left the younger firm. The splits have all been described as copacetic, and with a SpaceX IPO reportedly focusing on a $1.5 trillion valuation coming as quickly as this summer season, everybody concerned stands to do very effectively financially on their approach out the door.
The moon itself is a more moderen preoccupation. For many of SpaceX’s 24-year existence, Mars was the top recreation. This previous Sunday, simply earlier than the Tremendous Bowl, Musk shocked many, posting that SpaceX had “shifted focus to constructing a self-growing metropolis on the Moon,” arguing {that a} Mars colony would take “20+ years.” The moon, he stated, may get there in half the time.
It’s a reasonably large change in route for a corporation that has by no means despatched a mission to the moon.
Rationally or in any other case, traders do appear significantly extra enthusiastic about knowledge facilities in orbit than about colonies on different planets. (Even for essentially the most affected person cash within the room, that’s a protracted timeline.) However to no less than one enterprise backer in xAI who talked with this editor final yr, the lunar ambitions don’t have anything to do with Wall Road and aren’t a distraction from xAI’s core mission; they’re inseparable from it.
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June 23, 2026
The speculation, laid out by the VC on the time, is that Musk has been constructing towards a single aim from the start: the world’s strongest world mannequin, an AI educated not simply on textual content and pictures however on proprietary real-world knowledge that no competitor can replicate. Tesla contributes power techniques and highway topology. Neuralink provides a window into the mind. SpaceX supplies physics and orbital mechanics. The Boring Firm provides some subsurface knowledge. Add a moon manufacturing unit to the combination and also you begin to see the define of one thing very highly effective.
Whether or not that imaginative and prescient is achievable is a really massive query. One other is whether or not it’s authorized. Underneath the 1967 Outer Area Treaty, no nation — and by extension, no firm — can declare sovereignty over the moon. However a 2015 U.S. legislation opened a big loophole — when you can’t personal the moon, you’ll be able to personal no matter you extract from it. As Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of science and know-how research at Wesleyan College, defined to TechCrunch final month, the excellence is considerably illusory. “It’s extra like saying you’ll be able to’t personal the home, however you’ll be able to have the floorboards and the beams,” she stated. “As a result of the stuff that’s within the moon is the moon.”
That authorized framework is the scaffolding on which Musk’s moon ambitions apparently relaxation, whilst not everybody has agreed to play by these guidelines (China and Russia definitely haven’t). In the meantime, because the group that was supposed to assist him get there retains getting smaller, it isn’t clear who shall be serving to him on this journey or whether or not, extra instantly, his latest all-hands answered extra questions than it raised.
