Elon Musk Revives Moon Ambitions as SpaceX Plans Expand and IPO Talks Grow
In an each- hands meeting with workers from his company xAI, Mr. Musk sketched out plans for a lunar installation with a mammoth launch to shoot his satellites into space.
Elon Musk addresses xAI employees during an all-hands meeting outlining his vision for a lunar AI satellite factory and space-based computing expansion.
Elon Musk convened workers of his AI incipiency xAI for an each- hands meeting on Tuesday night. He wanted to talk about the future, and, well, how the moon plays into it.
The New York Times, which obtained word of the meeting, reports that Musk told employees that the company should build a factory on the moon to manufacture AI satellites, and then catapult them into space. “You have to go to the moon,” Musk told employees, according to the Times. Elon Musk lunar factory plan, he argued, will allow xAI to eventually amass more computing power than anyone else.
Of course, Musk also noted, with some pride, that things at SpaceX lunar city priority are going to change quite a bit. “If you’re moving faster than anyone else at any point in any given technology field, you will be the leader,” Musk told employees. “We are moving faster than anyone else in everything — there is nobody close,” he added. He concluded by saying that “when things like this happen, there’s some people that are really well suited for the early part of a company and other people that are less well suited for the later part.”
We don’t know why Musk wanted to convene such a meeting, but timing-wise, it’s at least interesting. Just one day earlier, xAI co-founder Tony Wu said he was quitting the company. Hours before Musk’s meeting, another co-founder of xAI who reported directly to Musk, Jimmy Ba, said he too was leaving AI and space integration strategy. Musk’s mooncatapult satellite launch factory news comes just six xAI employees: the company had 12 founding members.
