On Tuesday evening, Elon Musk gathered the workers of xAI for an all-hands assembly. Evidently, he needed to speak about the way forward for his AI firm, and particularly, the way it pertains to the moon.
In line with The New York Occasions, which experiences that it heard the meeting, Musk advised staff that xAI wants a lunar manufacturing facility, a manufacturing unit on the moon that can construct AI satellites and fling them into area by way of an enormous 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, “however it’s going to be extremely thrilling to see it occur.”
What Musk didn’t seem to deal with clearly was how any of this is able to 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 the event you’re shifting sooner than anybody else in any given expertise area, you’ll be the chief,” he advised staff, per the Occasions, “and xAI is shifting sooner than another firm — nobody’s even shut.” He added that “when this occurs, there’s some people who find themselves higher suited to the early levels of an organization and fewer suited to the later levels.”
It isn’t clear what prompted the all-hands, however the timing, no matter its trigger, is a minimum of 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 overall 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 time, everybody concerned stands to do very properly financially on their manner out the door.
The moon itself is a newer preoccupation. For many of SpaceX’s 24-year existence, Mars was the tip 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, might get there in half the time.
It’s a reasonably large change in path for a corporation that has by no means despatched a mission to the moon.
Rationally or in any other case, buyers do appear significantly extra enthusiastic about information 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 a minimum of 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 objective from the start: the world’s strongest world mannequin, an AI skilled not simply on textual content and pictures however on proprietary real-world information that no competitor can replicate. Tesla contributes vitality programs and street topology. Neuralink gives a window into the mind. SpaceX gives physics and orbital mechanics. The Boring Firm provides some subsurface information. Add a moon manufacturing unit to the combo 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 large query. One other is whether or not it’s authorized. Underneath the 1967 Outer House Treaty, no nation — and by extension, no firm — can declare sovereignty over the moon. However a 2015 U.S. legislation opened a big loophole — whilst you can’t personal the moon, you possibly can personal no matter you extract from it. As Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of science and expertise research at Wesleyan College, defined to TechCrunch final month, the excellence is considerably illusory. “It’s extra like saying you possibly can’t personal the home, however you possibly can 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 workforce 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.
