XAI has recently seen a spate of high-level resignations. Several of the company’s original 11 co-founders have left the company, with one of them, Tony Wu, resigning just yesterday.
Musk reportedly hopes to raise $50 billion from investors if SpaceX becomes a publicly traded company with XAI, and there’s a very real possibility that retirement and pension funds will soon be among those holding a stake in the venture. His latest speech reveals that the purpose of this venture includes building a science-fiction catapult to the Moon, discovering ancient aliens, and for some reason consuming a greater percentage of the Sun’s energy than ever before.
And it would be one thing if any of this were communicated coherently. Jeff Bezos has made similarly bizarre statements about realizing the fantasies of 70s science-fiction writers, but – and trust me when I say this only as a compliment – at least Bezos had his thoughts together when he said this, and at least he says this kind of thing on a podcast rather than in a speech given live to his employees.
As I wrote last week, Musk is working hard to make the merger between SpaceX, which is mostly a rocket company, and XAI, which is mostly a software company, work. A coherent version of their pitch for SpaceX and
But Musk’s pitch also involves the inversion of this concept, or at least an attempt to invert the concept in a sweaty, high-effort, ultimately vague way. If I honestly try my best to make Musk’s speech make sense, he is arguing that only through the merger of XAI and SpaceX can the concept of intelligence – artificial or otherwise – be collected and benefited from hypothetical knowledge in all the vastness of space, including what can be gleaned from aliens, or through the excavation of the remains of extinct aliens.
And that’s not to mention their seemingly unrelated preoccupation with harnessing a larger and larger percentage of the Sun’s energy – a logical carbuncle stuck haphazardly all over the pitch. He seems to be getting closer to a fun concept of futurism called the Kardashev Scale, which measures the progress of civilizations, but he never quite manages to get down to that metaphorical level.
But don’t take it from me that all this means nothing. Again, with an IPO coming, you’ll have to read the entire section of his speech about the future of XAI and SpaceX, which I’ve written here verbatim, except for the ums and uhs.
News: xAI recently publicly posted the entire 45-minute all-hands meeting Elon Musk held with employees.pic.twitter.com/zw4WFdeKvV
– Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) 11 February 2026
(This is a transcript of everything from 41 minutes and 35 seconds to the end in the video.)
“To expand the universe, you have to explore the universe.
There’s only so much you can learn by being on Earth with telescopes and colliders. Ultimately you have to go out there and explore the universe. To understand this. And this is the inspiration behind the combination of SpaceX and xAI. It is meant to accelerate humanity’s future in understanding the universe and bringing the light of consciousness to the stars.
So in the grand scheme of things when you look at how much energy the Earth is actually using for civilization, we’re only using, quote, about one percent of the Earth’s potential energy right now. And if we wanted to harness even one millionth of the Sun’s energy, it would be about a million times more than what civilization currently uses. The only way to access that energy – the Sun’s energy – is to extend beyond the Earth.
The Earth is actually a tiny, tiny speck of dust in a vast darkness. The Sun accounts for 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System. So you have to expand beyond a tiny dust particle like Earth to make any significant dent in harnessing the Sun’s energy. That said, to get one millionth of our Sun’s energy you would have to expand about a million times. And then, expanding beyond that, to the Milky Way, and perhaps someday even other galaxies.
So the next step beyond Earth data centers are Earth orbital data centers, and we will launch orbital data centers at the 100 to 200 gigawatt level per year with SpaceX. Not cumulative. I mean every year. And finally, we see a way to launch as much as one terawatt of computation per year from Earth.
But what if you want to go beyond just terawatts per year? To do this you have to go to the moon.
So, by setting up factories on the Moon, building AI satellites, and creating a mass driver – which is a thing you only really learn about, read about, in science fiction, but we’re going to make it real – we’re actually going to put a mass driver on the Moon. And if you do that, you can go several orders of magnitude higher. You can go up to 1,000 gigawatts per year or more, and eventually get maybe one millionth, and then, maybe one thousandth, and maybe even a few percent, of the Sun’s energy.
It’s hard to imagine what that level of intelligence would think, but it would be incredibly exciting to see it happen. I really want to see that mass driver on the moon shooting AI satellites into deep space. Just going like “shoom, shoom” one after the other. I can’t imagine anything more epic than putting a massive rocket on the Moon, and a self-sustaining city on the Moon, and then going beyond the Moon to Mars, moving around in our solar system, and eventually living there among the stars, and visiting all these star systems.
Maybe we will meet aliens. Perhaps we will see some civilizations that lasted for millions of years. And we will find remains of ancient alien civilizations. But the only way we can do that is to go out there and explore. And this is one way to make it happen. Thank you.”
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