With co-founders departing and an IPO looming, Elon Musk is turning his talk to the moon

On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered xAI employees for an all-hands meeting. He clearly 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 reported listening to the meeting, Musk told employees that XAI needed a Lunar Manufacturing Facility, a factory on the moon that would build AI satellites and launch them into space via a giant catapult. “You should go to the moon,” he told The Times. He explained that this move will help XAI harness more computing power than any competitor. He added: “It is difficult to imagine what an intelligence of this size could think, but it would be very exciting to see it happen.”

What Musk doesn’t seem to address clearly is how any of this will be built, or how he plans to reorganize the newly combined xAI-SpaceX entity that’s simultaneously headed toward a potentially historic IPO. He proudly admitted that the company is in a constant state of change. “If you move faster than anyone else in any given technology area, you will be the leader, and xAI is moving faster than any other company — and no one is even close,” he told employees, according to the Times. “When this happens, there are some people who are better suited for the early stages of the company and less suited for the later stages,” he added.

It’s not clear what prompted all the hands, but the timing, whatever its cause, is at least curious. On Monday night, xAI co-founder Tony Wu announced that he was leaving the company. Less than a day later, XAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who reported directly to Musk, said he was also pulling back. This brings the total to six of xAI’s 12 founding members who have now left the startup. The splits have all been described as divisive, and with SpaceX’s IPO reportedly targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation as soon as this summer, all involved will do well financially on their way out the door.

The moon itself is a major concern lately. For most of SpaceX’s 24-year existence, Mars was the endgame. Last Sunday, just before the Super Bowl, Musk surprised many, posting that SpaceX had “shifted its focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon,” arguing that a Mars colony would take “more than 20 years.” He said the moon could get there in half the time.

It’s a pretty big change in direction for a company that has never sent a mission to the moon.

Rational or otherwise, investors seem more excited about data centers in orbit than colonies on other planets. (Even for the most patient money in the room, that’s a long timeline.) But to at least one backer of the project at xAI who spoke with this editor last year, the lunar ambitions have nothing to do with Wall Street and represent no diversion from xAI’s core mission; They are inseparable from him.

The theory put forth by venture capital at the time was that Musk was building toward one goal from the beginning: the world’s most powerful global model, an AI trained not just on text and images but also on proprietary real-world data that no competitor could replicate. Tesla contributes to energy systems and road topology. Neuralink offers a window into the brain. SpaceX provides orbital physics and mechanics. The Boring Company adds some data beneath the surface. Add Moon Plant to the mix and you start to see the outlines of something very powerful.

Whether this vision is achievable is a very big question. Another is whether it is legal. Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no country – and therefore no company – can claim sovereignty over the Moon. But a 2015 US law opened a huge loophole – while you can’t own the moon, you can own everything you extract from it. As Mary Jane Rubinstein, a professor of science and technology studies at Wesleyan University, explained to TechCrunch last month, this distinction is somewhat illusory. “It’s like saying you can’t have the house, but you can have the floorboards and beams,” she said. “Because the things in the moon He is the moon.”

This legal framework appears to be the scaffolding on which Musk’s moon ambitions rest, even though not everyone agrees to play by these rules (certainly not China and Russia). Meanwhile, as the team that was supposed to help him get there keeps dwindling, it’s not clear who will help him on this adventure or whether his newest hands, right off the bat, have answered more questions than they’ve raised.