With his co-founders leaving and an IPO looming, Elon Musk is turning to 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 specifically, how it relates to the moon.

According to The New York Times, which said that heard the meetingMusk told the staff that xAI needed a lunar base, a factory on the moon that would build AI satellites and launch them into space via a large launch pad. “You should go to the moon,” he said, according to the Times. The move, he explained, will enable xAI to use more computing power than any opponent. “It’s hard to imagine what this kind of intelligence will come up with,” he added, “but it will be very interesting to see it happen.”

What Musk didn’t seem to make clear was how this would be built, or how he plans to reshape the newly incorporated content. xAI-SpaceX the agency overseeing a potentially historic IPO. He admitted, proudly, that the company was doing well. “If you’re moving faster than anyone else in any 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 this happens, there are some people who are qualified at the beginning of the company and not qualified for the later stages.”

It’s not clear what caused all the fuss, but the timing, whatever it was, is curious. On Monday night, xAI co-founder Tony Wu announced his departure. Less than a day later, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who reported directly to Musk, said he was also jumping. It brings totals six of xAI’s 12 founding members have now left the young company. All fractions have been described as copacetic, and a SpaceX IPO is said to be looking at a $1.5 trillion deal coming as soon as this summer, everyone involved needs to be financially successful on the way out.

The month itself is very busy lately. For most of SpaceX’s 24 years, Mars was the end game. Last Sunday, before the Super Bowl, Musk surprised many, writing that SpaceX “changed the goal of building a prosperous city on the Moon,” arguing that Mars would take “20+ years.” The moon, he said, could get there in half the time.

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

Fairly or not, investors seem more excited about data centers in orbit than areas on other planets. (Even the most patient money in the room, it’s a long time.) But for at least one contributor in xAI who spoke to the editor last year, the wishes of the moon are not aligned with Wall Street and do not distract from the main goal of xAI; they are inseparable from it.

The idea, created by the VC at the time, is that Musk has been building to one goal from the beginning: the most powerful model in the world, an AI trained not on text and images but on real-time information that no competitor can duplicate. Tesla supports electrical systems and road topology. Neuralink provides a window into the brain. SpaceX provides physics and orbital mechanics. The Boring Company adds some underground equipment. Add the moon factory to the mix and start to see the process of something very powerful.

Whether that vision is possible is a very big question. Another thing if it’s legal. Under the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, no nation – and by extension, no company – can claim control of the moon. But the US law of 2015 opened a big way – while you can’t own the moon, you can have everything you can get away with. As Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of science and technology education at Wesleyan University, explained to TechCrunch last monththe difference is meaningless. “It’s like saying you can’t own a house, but you can own wood and lumber,” he said. “Because of the things on the moon and month.”

This law is the way in which Musk’s moon desires are evident, although not all have agreed to abide by these laws (China and Russia have not). Meanwhile, the team that was supposed to help him get there is dwindling, it’s unclear who will help him on this journey or if, at the same time, his new hands answered more questions than they raised.