All-Hands Meeting And Lunar Plan
Elon Musk told employees at xAI during an all-hands meeting on Tuesday night that the company needs a manufacturing facility on the moon, according to The New York Times, which reported that it heard the meeting. Musk said the facility would build AI satellites and send them into space using a giant catapult. “You have to go to the moon,” he said, according to the Times, and he added that the approach would allow xAI to secure more computing power than any competitor. “It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about,” he said, “but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”
Questions About Execution And Company Structure
The report said Musk did not explain how such a project would be built or how he plans to reorganize the recently merged xAI-SpaceX entity, which is moving toward a potential initial public offering. He did tell employees that the company is in a period of change. “If you’re moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you will be the leader,” he said, according to the Times, and he added that xAI is moving faster than other companies. He also said that some people are better suited to early stages of a company and less suited to later stages.
Recent Departures From The Founding Team
The timing of the meeting followed recent leadership changes. On Monday night, xAI co-founder Tony Wu said he was leaving the company. Less than a day later, another co-founder, Jimmy Ba, who reported directly to Musk, said he was also departing. Those exits bring the total to six of xAI’s 12 founding members who have left the company. The departures have been described as amicable. A SpaceX initial public offering has been reported as targeting a valuation of $1.5 trillion and could occur as soon as this summer, which would mean financial gains for people involved.
Shift In Focus From Mars To The Moon
Musk’s public focus on the moon is recent. For much of SpaceX’s 24-year history, Mars had been presented as the long-term objective. This past Sunday, just before the Super Bowl, Musk posted that SpaceX had “shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon,” and he argued that a Mars colony would take more than 20 years, while the moon could be reached in about half that time. SpaceX has not yet sent a mission to the moon.
Investor Interest And A Broader Technical Rationale
Investors have shown more interest in data centers in orbit than in long-term planetary colonies, given the timelines involved. A venture backer in xAI told this editor last year that the lunar plans were not aimed at financial markets and were not separate from xAI’s main objective. The view presented at the time was that Musk has been working toward a single system, described as a large world model, trained not only on text and images but also on proprietary real-world data that competitors cannot copy.
Contributions From Musk’s Other Companies
Under that idea, Tesla would provide data related to energy systems and road topology. Neuralink would contribute information linked to the brain. SpaceX would add data on physics and orbital mechanics. The Boring Company would supply subsurface data. Adding a lunar manufacturing site would extend that set of inputs.
Legal Framework Around The Moon
Whether such a plan can be carried out remains uncertain, and legal questions remain open. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty states that no nation, and by extension no company, can claim sovereignty over the moon. A 2015 U.S. law allows ownership of resources extracted from celestial bodies. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of science and technology studies at Wesleyan University, told TechCrunch last month that the distinction is limited. “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.” China and Russia have not accepted that framework.
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