With co-founders leaving and IPO looming, Elon Musk talks to the moon.

On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered the xAI staff for an all-hands meeting. Clearly, he wanted to talk about the future of AI companies, especially how it relates to the moon.

Musk told employees that xAI needed a lunar manufacturing facility, a factory that would build AI satellites and launch them into space via giant catapults, according to The New York Times, which reported listening to the meeting. “I have to go to the moon,” he said, according to the Times. He explained that this move will help xAI utilize more computing power than any of its competitors. “It’s hard to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would be thinking, but it would be incredibly exciting to see that happen,” he added.

What Musk didn’t clearly state was how this would be built, or how he planned to restructure the newly merged xAI-SpaceX entity, which is simultaneously pursuing a potentially historic IPO. He proudly acknowledged that the company was in flux. According to the Times, he told employees, “If you move faster than anyone else in a particular technology, you will be a leader. And xAI is moving faster than any other company. No one can come close.” “When this happens, you have people who are better suited for the early stages of the company and less suited for later stages,” he added.

It’s not clear what triggered it all, but whatever the cause, the timing is at least curious. On Monday night, xAI co-founder Tony Wu announced he was leaving the company. Less than a day later, Jimmy Ba, another xAI co-founder who reports directly to Musk, said he, too, was on the rebound. This brings the total to 6 of xAI’s 12 founding members who have now left the young company. The split has been described as fair, and with the SpaceX IPO reportedly targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation this summer, everyone involved will be doing very well financially on the way out.

The moon itself is something of recent interest. For most of SpaceX’s 24-year existence, Mars has been the end game. Last Sunday, just before the Super Bowl, Musk surprised many by posting that SpaceX had “shifted its focus to building its own growing city on the Moon” and claiming that a Mars colony would take “20+ years.” He said the moon could get there in half the time.

It’s a pretty big change of direction for a company that has never sent a mission to the moon.

Reasonably or not, investors seem to be much more interested in data centers in orbit than in colonies on other planets. (That’s a long timeline, even for the most patient money in the room.) But for at least one venture backer of xAI who spoke with this editor last year, Dahl’s ambitions have nothing to do with Wall Street and do not interfere with xAI’s core mission. They cannot be separated from it.

The theory presented by the VC at the time was that Musk had been building toward a single goal from the beginning. That means the world’s most powerful global model, AI trained not only on text and images, but also on exclusive real-world data that no competitor can replicate. Tesla contributes to energy systems and road topology. Neuralink provides a window into your brain. SpaceX provides physics and orbital dynamics. Boring Company adds some underground data. Add the Moon Factory to the mix and you start to see the outlines of something very powerful.

Whether that vision is achievable is a very big question. Another thing is whether it is legal or not. According to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no country, and by extension no company, can claim sovereignty over the Moon. But the 2015 U.S. law opened a major loophole. You can’t own the moon, but you can own anything extracted from the moon.

As Mary-Jane Rubenstein, professor of science and technology studies at Wesleyan University, explained to TechCrunch last month, the distinction is somewhat illusory. “It’s like saying you can’t own a house, but you can have floorboards and beams,” she said. “Because it’s a substance on the moon. is moon.”

While not everyone has agreed to follow those rules (although China and Russia certainly have not), this legal framework is clearly the stepping stone on which Musk’s moon ambitions rest. Meanwhile, the team helping him is getting smaller, at least for now.