On February 11, according to the New York Times, Elon Musk told employees at his AI company xAI on Tuesday night local time that the company needs to build a factory on the moon to manufacture AI satellites and a huge catapult to launch them into space.


Musk

Inspired by Musk's beloved science fiction novels, the space catapult will be called a mass projector and will be part of the company's imagined lunar facility.The facility is used to manufacture satellites that provide computing power for xAI’s AI.

"You have to go to the moon," Musk said at the all-hands meeting. He said that this move will help xAI obtain more powerful computing power than other companies to build its AI.

Musk also added that "it's hard to imagine what an agent of this magnitude would think, but it would be very exciting to see it come to fruition."

Last week, Musk announced the merger of xAI with rocket company SpaceX to promote plans to build AI data centers in outer space. now,That vision has expanded to include a lunar facility, but his hour-long speech (along with those from other executives) did not spell out how that facility would be built.

The moon is a stepping stone to Mars

Musk's obsession with the moon is relatively recent. Since founding SpaceX in 2002, he has said that making humans a multiplanetary species is the company's raison d'etre, starting with establishing a colony on Mars. But in recent months, he has frequently posted content on his social platform X about the company’s new focus: the moon.

Two former SpaceX executives told the New York Times that the moon has never been the company's main focus.

During his speech on Tuesday, Musk described the moon as a stepping stone to Mars. He said the company would first build "a self-sufficient city" on the moon, then go to Mars and eventually explore star systems in search of extraterrestrial life.

X’s daily life will exceed 1 billion

Musk also talked to employees about more practical work matters. Musk, together with executives from social media X, which was merged into xAI last year, introduced the progress of the social network and his expectations for its future development.


xAI California Headquarters

Musk said that X currently has about 600 million monthly active users (the New York Times was unable to verify this number). In 2022, when he acquired Twitter, the predecessor of X, its financial report showed that the number of daily active users who could view ads was 237.8 million.

“Most people only open the X app occasionally when major international events occur,” Musk said frankly. But he said,More services will be added in the coming months that will make X even more attractive, such as a banking feature called X Money and a standalone chat app.

"We're obviously going to give people good, compelling reasons to use this app every day, and my expectation is that we'll have well over a billion daily active users," he said.

Musk has made bold and sometimes inaccurate predictions about when new technologies will be rolled out. For example, he said in 2016 that SpaceX would send its first cargo to Mars in 2018, but this mission has not yet materialized.

Founder leaves

However, he told employees,He expects xAI to continue growing rapidly, while hinting that the company may lose some of its early employees and undergo a possible reorganization.

"If you grow faster than everyone else in any given technology area, you become a leader, and xAI is growing faster than any company, and no other company can even catch up," Musk said. "Given that we have reached a certain scale, the company is making organizational adjustments to operate more efficiently at that scale. In fact, when this adjustment occurs, some people are more suitable for the early stages of the company and less suitable for the later stages."

In less than 48 hours, xAI co-founders Wu Yuhuai and Jimmy Ba have announced their resignations.