Katherine Li, West Coast breaking news reporter at the Business Insider.

3 takeaways from Elon Musk’s xAI all-hands, from a moon city to a company restructuring

XAI just had its first all-hands meeting since its merger with SpaceX.

In the recorded event on Tuesday night, CEO Elon Musk outlined a new organizational structure — the main Grok product and Grok Voice, Grok Code, Grok Imagine, and the company’s Macrohard project. The all-hands was later posted on X on Wednesday.

From a plan to build a catapult, or mass driver, on the moon to soothing nerves after the restructuring, here are the main takeaways from xAI’s latest all-hands meeting.

1. Addressing the restructure

There are now only six members left of an original founding team of 12 at xAI, following two more exits earlier this week.

Musk addressed the new restructuring.

“Because we’ve reached a certain scale, we’re organizing the company to be more effective at this scale,” said Musk. “Now, naturally, 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.”

On Monday, Tony Wu announced his resignation in a post on X, writing that it was “time for my next chapter.” Less than 24 hours later, fellow cofounder Jimmy Ba followed suit, posting that Tuesday was his last day and thanking Musk for “bringing us together on this incredible journey.”

2. Shooting from the moon

Musk is promising the moon, literally.

“Ultimately, we see a path to maybe launching as much as a terawatt per year of compute from earth, but what if you want to go beyond a mere terawatt per year?” said Musk. “In order to do that, you have to go to the moon.”

His goal is to launch AI sattelites from the moon, he told employees.

“I can’t imagine anything more epic than a mass driver on the moon and a self-sustaining city on the moon, and then going beyond the moon to Mars, going throughout our solar system, and ultimately being out there among the stars and visiting all these star systems,” Musk added. “Maybe we’ll meet aliens.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is also researching the feasability of data centers in space, citing limited resources on Earth, such as water and electricity. Data centers are already facing backlash for driving up utility costs for average households.

3. Product updates and launches

A stand-alone app for XChat and a new transaction app called X Money are coming in the next few months, according to Musk.

During the all-hands meeting, Musk said that users who only want to use the messaging function could use the standalone XChat app without visiting the X platform. He said the app will also be on desktop and can handle multi-user video calls.

“For XMoney, we actually had XMoney live in closed beta within the company, and we expect in the next month or two to go to a limited external beta and then to go worldwide to all X users,” said Musk.

“And this is really intended to be the place where all the money is, the central source of all monetary transactions,” Musk added. “So it’s really going to be a game changer.”




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Inside xAI’s all-hands: Elon Musk says if the company can survive the next 2 to 3 years, it will come out on top

Elon Musk appears to be feeling upbeat about the future of his AI company.

At a companywide meeting at xAI’s San Francisco headquarters last week, Musk told staff that if the company could survive the next two to three years, xAI would triumph over its competitors, several sources with knowledge of the meeting said.

The xAI CEO said that the company’s ability to rapidly scale its power and data capacity would be a key ingredient in the race to achieve superintelligence — which surpasses human intelligence — and become the most powerful AI company.

Musk said that xAI could achieve artificial general intelligence, which matches or exceeds human intelligence, in the next few years, even as soon as 2026, sources said.

Musk said in November that xAI had a 10% likelihood of achieving AGI with its Grok 5 model, which he has said the company plans to release early next year.

The CEO also told staff that xAI would have an advantage over other AI companies because it would have access to around $20 billion to $30 billion in funding per year, and it could benefit from its proximity to his other companies, sources said. Tesla integrated Grok into its vehicles earlier this year.

Overall, workers said Musk appeared happy with the company’s progress. One insider described the meeting as “peppy.”

Musk also theorized about building data centers in space and his plans to colonize Mars, the sources said. He said that Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot could eventually man such extraterrestrial data centers, the people said.

Musk has previously said that Optimus could provide support for SpaceX missions as soon as next year. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have publicly talked about the possibility of building data centers in space, though Pichai acknowledged that it is a “moonshot.”

In response to Business Insider’s request for a comment, the company responded with an automated message: “Legacy Media Lies.”

Over the past year, xAI has rapidly expanded the footprint of its data centers, a project it has named Colossus. Earlier this year, the company said it had around 200,000 GPUs, and Musk has said it plans to expand to 1 million GPUs.

xAI is one of many companies racing to build AGI and justify valuations worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Despite Musk’s outsize profile, xAI is still a relatively new player in a race dominated by giants like OpenAI and Google.

The AI race shows no signs of slowing down. Earlier this month, OpenAI entered a state of emergency as it raced to push out its latest model, according to reports. Google released a new Gemini model in November, and xAI has pushed new versions of Grok in rapid succession.

During the all-hands, xAI leads demonstrated several updates to existing products, such as Grok Voice, the company’s app for Tesla owners, and its agents, sources said. Some of the updates included improvements to Grok’s ability to predict outcomes, better listening functions for Grok voice, and video editing, the people said.

Do you work at xAI or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gkay@businessinsider.com or Signal at 248-894-6012. Use a personal email address, a nonwork device, and nonwork WiFi; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.




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