With co-founders leaving and an IPO looming, Elon Musk turns talk to the moon

Source: TechCrunch

All‑Hands Meeting

On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered the employees of xAI for an all‑hands meeting to discuss the future of his AI company and its relationship to the moon.

According to The New York Times, which reported that it heard the meeting link, Musk told staff that xAI needs a lunar manufacturing facility—a factory on the moon that will build AI satellites and launch them via a giant catapult.

“You have to go to the moon,” he said.
“It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about, but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”

The All‑Hands Message

Musk did not detail how the lunar factory would be built or how the newly merged xAI‑SpaceX entity would be reorganized as it approaches a potentially historic IPO. He did acknowledge that the company is “in flux” and emphasized speed:

“If you’re moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you will be the leader… and xAI is moving faster than any other company — no one’s even close.”

He added that “when this happens, there are some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages.”

Founders Departing

The timing of the meeting is notable. On Monday night, xAI co‑founder Tony Wu announced his departure, and less than a day later, co‑founder Jimmy Ba—who reported directly to Musk—also left. This brings the total to six of xAI’s 12 founding members who have now exited the company TechCrunch report.

The departures have been described as amicable. With a SpaceX IPO reportedly targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation as early as this summer TechCrunch IPO coverage, many insiders stand to benefit financially.

Shift From Mars to the Moon

For most of SpaceX’s 24‑year history, Mars was the ultimate destination. This past Sunday, just before the Super Bowl, Musk announced that SpaceX had “shifted focus to building a self‑growing city on the Moon,” arguing that a Mars colony would take “20+ years,” whereas a lunar settlement could be achieved in roughly half that time.

Investors appear more excited about orbital data centers than about planetary colonies, but a venture backer who spoke with the editor last year said the lunar ambitions are inseparable from xAI’s core mission rather than a distraction.

The Bigger Vision

The VC’s theory, as explained at the time, is that Musk is building toward a single goal: the world’s most powerful “world model,” an AI trained not only on text and images but also on proprietary real‑world data that competitors cannot replicate. The ecosystem includes:

• Tesla – energy systems and road topology
• Neuralink – brain‑machine interface data
• SpaceX – physics and orbital mechanics
• The Boring Company – subsurface data
• Moon factory – large‑scale manufacturing and resource extraction

Combining these data sources could create a uniquely powerful AI system.

Legal Considerations

Whether the lunar vision is achievable is a major question, and its legality is equally complex. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits any nation—or, by extension, any company—from claiming sovereignty over the moon. However, a 2015 U.S. law created a loophole: while you cannot own the moon itself, you can own what you extract from it.

Mary‑Jane Rubenstein, professor of science and technology studies at Wesleyan University, explained to TechCrunch that the distinction is “somewhat illusory.” As she put it:

“It’s more like saying you can’t own the house, but you can have the floorboards and the beams… Because the stuff that is in the moon is the moon.” Full interview

This legal framework underpins Musk’s lunar ambitions, even as other nations such as China and Russia have not agreed to play by those rules. With the team that was supposed to help him shrink, it remains unclear who will execute the plan or whether the recent all‑hands meeting clarified more than it obscured.