Elon Musk gathered xAI employees for an all-hands meeting Tuesday night to outline an ambitious vision for the company’s future, one that apparently involves building a factory on the moon.
According to The New York Times, which reported on the meeting, Musk told employees that xAI would need a lunar manufacturing facility capable of building AI satellites and launching them into space using a giant catapult. The goal, he said, would be to generate more computing power than any rival AI company.
“You have to go to the moon,” Musk reportedly told employees. He added that such a scale would create an intelligence so advanced that it would be “difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about,” but “incredibly exciting to see it happen.”
Musk did not clearly explain how such a facility would be built or how the recently merged xAI-SpaceX entity would be reorganized as it moves toward a potentially historic IPO. SpaceX is reportedly targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation as soon as this summer.
“If you’re moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you will be the leader,” Musk told employees, according to the Times. “xAI is moving faster than any other company, no one’s even close.” He also acknowledged that rapid growth can create internal shifts, noting that some people are better suited to early-stage companies than later phases.
The timing of the meeting raised eyebrows. On Monday night, xAI co-founder Tony Wu announced his departure. Less than 24 hours later, another co-founder, Jimmy Ba, who reported directly to Musk, also said he was leaving. That brings the total to six of xAI’s 12 founding members who have exited the company.
While the departures have been described as amicable, the shrinking leadership bench comes at a critical moment. xAI is competing in an increasingly intense AI arms race, and its flagship chatbot Grok must keep pace with models from OpenAI and Anthropic as the company prepares for public market scrutiny.
Read Also: Another xAI Co-Founder Leaves As Talent Exodus Continues
Musk’s renewed focus on the moon also marks a notable strategic shift. For most of SpaceX’s 24-year history, Mars was positioned as the ultimate goal. However, shortly before the Super Bowl, Musk posted that SpaceX had “shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon,” arguing that a Mars colony could take more than 20 years, while a lunar settlement might be achieved in half that time.
SpaceX has yet to send a mission to the moon.
Some investors appear more enthusiastic about orbital data centers, which could support AI infrastructure, than long-term planetary colonization efforts. According to one venture capitalist, Musk’s broader ambition may be to build the world’s most powerful “world model” AI by integrating proprietary data from across his companies: Tesla’s energy and driving systems, Neuralink’s brain-interface data, SpaceX’s orbital and physics data, and potentially lunar-based infrastructure.
However, legal questions remain. Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no nation, and by extension no private company, can claim sovereignty over the moon. A 2015 U.S. law allows companies to own resources they extract from celestial bodies, creating a legal gray area. As Wesleyan University professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein previously noted, distinguishing between the moon and its resources may be largely symbolic.
As Musk pushes forward with lunar ambitions and prepares for an IPO, xAI faces mounting pressure to retain talent, execute on its AI roadmap, and convince investors that its moonshot vision is more than just rhetoric.
