At the risk of stating the obvious, Elon Musk doesn’t always make sense when he talks. But at a recent all-hands meeting at xAI that was posted in full online, he made less sense than usual. This isn’t investment advice, but anyone considering buying stock in the SpaceX/xAI conglomerate expected to make an initial public offering later this year might want to give some real thought to how the founder and CEO is sounding lately.
xAI has seen a rash of high-level resignations recently. Many of the company’s 11 original cofounders have left, and one of these resignations, Tony Wu’s, happened just yesterday.
Musk reportedly hopes to raise $50 billion from investors once SpaceX with xAI is a publicly traded company, and there’s very real potential that retirement and pension funds will soon be among those holding a stake in this venture. Judging from his latest speech, the aims of this venture involve building a sci-fi catapult on the moon, discovering ancient aliens, and consuming an ever-greater percentage of the sun’s energy for some reason.
And it would be one thing if any of this were being communicated coherently. Jeff Bezos has made similarly bizarre statements about realizing the fantasies of 70s sci-fi writers, but—and trust me when I mean this as only the faintest of praise—at least Bezos’ thoughts held together when he said it, and at least he says this sort of thing on podcasts rather than during a speech delivered directly 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, make sense. A coherent version of his pitch for SpaceX and xAI as a single company might hang entirely on his idea—harebrained as it might arguably be—that data centers in orbit are necessary for the advancement of AI model training, and that only in space can all these data centers maximize solar exposure for energy, and minimize the effort required to cool them.
But Musk’s pitch involves the inverse of this concept too, or at least tries to invert the concept in a sweaty, high-effort, ultimately unclear way. If I earnestly do my best to make Musk’s speech make sense, he seems to be arguing that only through the merger of xAI and SpaceX can the concept of intelligence—artificial or otherwise—collect and benefit from hypothetical knowledge of space in all its vastness, including what can be gleaned from aliens, or through excavating the remnants of extinct aliens.
And that’s not to mention his seemingly unrelated preoccupation with harnessing a larger and larger percentage of the sun’s energy—a logical carbuncle glued randomly onto the entire pitch. He seems to be approaching a fun concept from futurism called the Kardashev Scale that measures the advancement of civilizations, but he never manages to land that rhetorical plane.
But don’t take it from me that this all makes no sense. Again, with an IPO looming, you owe it to yourself to read the entire section of his speech about the future of xAI and SpaceX, which I’ve transcribed verbatim here, minus the ums and uhs.
NEWS: xAI has just publicly posted the full 45 minute all-hands meeting that Elon Musk had with employees recently.pic.twitter.com/zw4WFdeKvV
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) February 11, 2026
(This is a transcript of everything from 41 minutes and 35 seconds in the video until the end.)
“In order to expand the universe, you must explore the universe.
There’s only so much you can learn from just being on earth, with telescopes and colliders on Earth. Ultimately you have to go out there and you have to explore the universe. To understand it. And that’s the motivation behind the combination of SpaceX and xAI. It’s to accelerate humanity’s future in understanding universe, and extending the light of consciousness to the stars.
So in the grand scheme of things when you look at how much energy Earth is actually using for civilization, we’re only right now using, quote, roughly one percent of the potential energy of Earth. And if we wanted to use even a millionth of the sun’s energy, that would be roughly a million times more energy than civilization currently uses. The only way to access that energy—the energy of the sun—is to extend beyond Earth.
Earth is really a tiny, tiny dust mote in a vast darkness. The sun is 99.8% of all mass in the solar system. So you have to expand beyond the tiny dust mote that is Earth to make any significant dent in using the sun’s energy. Like said, it’s—you’d have to expand roughly a million times just to get to one millionth of our sun’s energy. And then, going beyond that, exploring—extending—to the galaxy, and maybe someday even to other galaxies.
So the—the next step beyond Earth data centers are Earth orbital data centers, and we’ll be launching, with SpaceX, orbital data centers at the 100 to 200 gigawatt per year level. Not cumulative. I mean per year. And 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? In order to do that you have to go to the moon.
So, by having factories on the moon, building AI satellites, and having a mass driver—which is the kinda thing you really only learn about in, read about in, science fiction, but we’re gonna make it real—we’re actually gonna have a mass driver on the moon. And if you do that, you can go several orders of magnitude greater. You can go to 1,000 gigawatts or more per year, and ultimately get to maybe a millionth, and then, maybe a thousandth, and maybe even a few percent of the sun’s energy.
It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about, but it’s gonna be incredibly exciting to see it happen. I really wanna see the mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space. Just going like “shoom, shoom,” just one after the other. 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.
Maybe we’ll meet aliens. Maybe we’ll see some civilizations that lasted for millions of years. And we’ll find the remnants of ancient alien civilizations. But the only way we’re gonna do that is if we go out there and we explore. And this is a path to making it happen. Thank you.”
Read the full article here
