As the co-founders move along with the upcoming IPO, Elon Musk turns the tide on the moon

On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered the xAI staff for an all-hands meeting. Apparently, he wanted to talk about the future of his company’s AI, and in particular, how it relates to the moon.

According to the New York Times, which reported overhearing 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 with a giant catapult. “You should go to the moon,” he said, to the Times. This move, he explained, will help xAI use more computing power than any competitor. “It’s hard to imagine what a genius of that caliber will think,” he added, “but it will be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”

What Musk doesn’t seem to understand is how any of this will be built, or whether he plans to restructure the newly merged xAI-SpaceX business in anticipation of a potentially historic IPO at the same time. He admitted, proudly, that the company is changing. “If you move faster than anyone else in any technology field, you’re going to be a leader,” he told employees, according to the Times, “and xAI is moving faster than any other company — nobody’s even close.” He added that “when this happens, there are certain people who are better suited to the early stages of the company and not suited to the later stages.”

It’s not clear what caused all the hands, but timing, whatever its cause, is at least curious. On Monday night, xAI founder Tony Wu announced his departure. Less than a day later, another xAI co-founder, Jimmy Ba, who reported directly to Musk, said he was also jumping. That brings the total to six of the 12 founding members of xAI who have now left the small company. The split has all been described as amicable, and with the SpaceX IPO reportedly eyeing a $1.5 trillion valuation coming as soon as this summer, everyone involved will do very well financially when they walk out the door.

The moon itself is a recent story. For most of SpaceX’s 24-year run, Mars was the end game. This past Sunday, just before the Super Bowl, Musk surprised many, posting that SpaceX has “shifted its focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon,” saying that a Mars colony would take “20+ years.” The moon said it could get there in half the time.

It’s a huge change in approach for a company that has never sent a mission to the moon.

Logically or otherwise, investors seem more excited about data centers in orbit than colonies on other planets. (Even with a lot of patient money in the room, that’s a long timeline.) But for at least one xAI business supporter who spoke to this editor last year, the moonshots have nothing to do with Wall Street and are not distractions from xAI’s core mission; they are inseparable from it.

The theory, put forward by the VC at the time, is that Musk has been building on one goal from the beginning: a very powerful world model, an AI trained not just on text and images but on real-world proprietary data that no competitor can replicate. Tesla offers energy systems and road topology. Neuralink provides a window into the brain. SpaceX provides physics and orbital mechanics. The Boring Company adds some underground data. Add a moon factory to the mix and you start to see the outline of something very powerful.

Whether that vision can be realized is a very big question. Another thing is whether it is legal. Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no country – and by extension, no company – can claim sovereignty over the moon. But a 2015 US law opened an important loophole – while you can’t own the moon, you can own anything you take out of it. As Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of science and technology studies at Wesleyan University, explained to TechCrunch last month, the distinction is somewhat false. “It’s like saying you can’t own a house, but you can have lumber and beams,” he said. “Because things are on the moon is something month.”

That legal framework is the framework in which Musk’s monthly ambitions lie, as not everyone has agreed to play by those rules (China and Russia have not). Meanwhile, as the team that was supposed to help him get there is getting smaller, it is not clear who will help him in this process or that, soon, his newest hands will answer more questions than he raised.