On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered xAI employees for an all-hands meeting. Clearly, he wanted to talk about the future of his company’s AI, and specifically how it relates to the moon.
According to The New York Times, which said it overheard 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 using a giant catapult. “You have to go to the moon,” he said, according to the Times. The move, he explained, will help xAI tap into more computing power than any rival. “It’s hard to imagine what an intelligence of this magnitude would be thinking about,” he added, “but it will be incredibly exciting to see how it happens.”
Musk didn’t seem clear on how any of this would be built, or how he plans to reorganize the newly merged xAI-SpaceX entity, which is simultaneously handling a potentially historic IPO. He proudly acknowledged that the company was going through changes. “If you’re moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, 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 that happens, there are some people who are better suited to the early stages of society and less suited to the later stages.”
It’s unclear what prompted all the hands, but the timing, whatever its cause, is odd, to say the least. On Monday night, xAI co-founder Tony Wu announced he was leaving. Less than a day later, another xAI co-founder, Jimmy Ba, who reported directly to Musk, said he was also jumping. This brings the total to six of xAI’s 12 founding members who have now left the fledgling company. The splits have all been described as copacetic, and with the SpaceX IPO reportedly targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation coming as early as this summer, everyone involved will do very well financially.
The moon itself is a more recent issue. For most of SpaceX’s 24-year existence, Mars was the end game. Last Sunday, just before the Super Bowl, Musk surprised many when he announced that SpaceX had “shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the moon,” claiming the Mars colony would last “20+ years.” The moon, he said, could get there in half the time.
It’s a pretty big change in direction for a company that has never experienced a mission to the moon.
Rationally or otherwise, investors seem far more enthusiastic about data centers in orbit than about colonies on other planets. (That’s a long timeline, even for the most patient buck in the room.) But for at least one xAI backer who spoke to this editor last year, the lunar ambitions have nothing to do with Wall Street and don’t distract from xAI’s core mission; they are inseparable from it.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
The theory put forward by the VC at the time is that Musk was building toward a single goal from the start: the world’s most powerful model, an AI trained not only on text and images, but on its own real-world data that no competitor could replicate. Tesla contributes energy systems and road topology. Neuralink offers a window into the brain. SpaceX provides the physics and orbital mechanics. The Boring Company adds some subsurface data. Add to that a moon factory and you start to see the outline of something very powerful.
Whether this vision is achievable is a very big question. Another is whether it is legal. According to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no nation—and by extension no society—can claim sovereignty over the Moon. But a 2015 US law opened a significant loophole – while you can’t own the moon, you can own everything you mine from it.
As Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of science and technology studies at Wesleyan University, explained to TechCrunch last month, this distinction is somewhat illusory. “It’s more like saying you can’t own a house, but you can have floorboards and beams,” she said. “Because the things that are on the moon. is month.”
That legal framework is the scaffolding on which Musk’s lunar ambitions appear to rest, though not everyone has agreed to play by the rules (China and Russia certainly haven’t). Meanwhile, at least for now, the team to help him get there keeps shrinking.