{"id":473601,"date":"2026-02-11T20:53:17","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T20:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/473601\/"},"modified":"2026-02-11T20:53:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T20:53:17","slug":"with-co-founders-leaving-and-an-ipo-looming-elon-musk-turns-talk-to-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/473601\/","title":{"rendered":"With co-founders leaving and an IPO looming, Elon Musk turns talk to the moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered the employees of xAI for an all-hands meeting. Evidently, he wanted to talk about the future of his AI company and, specifically, how it relates to the moon.<\/p>\n

According to The New York Times, which reports that it heard the meeting<\/a>, Musk told employees that xAI needs a lunar manufacturing facility, a factory on the moon that will build AI satellites and fling them into space via a giant catapult. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to go to the moon,\u201d he said, per the Times. The move, he explained, will help xAI harness more computing power than any rival. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about,\u201d he added, \u201cbut it\u2019s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Musk didn\u2019t appear to address was how any of this would be built, or how he plans to reorganize the newly merged xAI-SpaceX <\/a>entity that is simultaneously careening toward a potentially historic IPO. He did acknowledge, proudly, that the company is in flux.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you will be the leader,\u201d he told employees, per the Times, \u201cand xAI is moving faster than any other company \u2014 no one\u2019s even close.\u201d He added that \u201cwhen this happens, there\u2019s some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages.\u201d<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t clear what prompted the all-hands, but the timing, whatever its cause, is at least curious. 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 bouncing, too. <\/p>\n

That brings the total to six of xAI\u2019s 12 founding members who have now left the young company<\/a>. The splits have all been described as copacetic, and with a SpaceX IPO<\/a> reportedly targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation coming as soon as this summer, everyone involved stands to do very well financially on their way out the door.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBoston, MA
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJune 23, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

The moon itself is a more recent preoccupation. For most of SpaceX\u2019s 24-year existence, Mars was the end game. This past Sunday, just before the Super Bowl, Musk surprised many, posting<\/a> that SpaceX had \u201cshifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon,\u201d arguing that a Mars colony would take \u201c20+ years.\u201d The moon, he said, could get there in half the time.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a pretty big change in direction for a company that has never sent a mission to the moon.<\/p>\n

Rationally or otherwise, investors do seem considerably more excited about data centers in orbit than about colonies on other planets. (Even for the most patient money in the room, that\u2019s a long timeline.) But to at least one venture backer in xAI who talked with this editor last year, the lunar ambitions have nothing to do with Wall Street and aren\u2019t a distraction from xAI\u2019s core mission; they\u2019re inseparable from it. <\/p>\n

The theory, laid out by the VC at the time, is that Musk has been building toward a single goal from the beginning: the world\u2019s most powerful world model, an AI trained not just on text and images but on proprietary real-world data that no competitor can replicate. <\/p>\n

Tesla contributes energy systems and road topology. Neuralink offers a window into the brain. SpaceX provides physics and orbital mechanics. The Boring Company adds some subsurface data. Add a moon factory to the mix and you start to see the outline of something quite powerful.<\/p>\n

Whether that vision is achievable is a very big question. Another is whether it is legal. Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no nation \u2014 and by extension, no company \u2014 can claim sovereignty over the moon. But a 2015 U.S. law opened a significant loophole \u2014 while you can\u2019t own the moon, you can own whatever you extract from it. <\/p>\n

As Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of science and technology studies at Wesleyan University, explained to TechCrunch last month<\/a>, the distinction is somewhat illusory. \u201cIt\u2019s more like saying you can\u2019t own the house, but you can have the floorboards and the beams,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause the stuff that is in the moon is the moon.\u201d<\/p>\n

That legal framework is the scaffolding on which Musk\u2019s moon ambitions apparently rest, even as not everyone has agreed to play by those rules (China and Russia certainly have not). Meanwhile, for now at least, the team to help him get there keeps getting smaller.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered the employees of xAI for an all-hands meeting. Evidently, he wanted to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473602,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,3120,5437,105,3123],"class_list":{"0":"post-473601","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-elon-musk","14":"tag-spacex","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-xai"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}