4 promises Musk made to xAI employees after co-founders Tony Wu & Jimmy Ba quit

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Elon Musk held an all-hands meeting with xAI employees hours after co-founders Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba announced their exits—the fifth and sixth from the 12-person founding team. Instead of addressing the departures head-on, Musk pitched a lunar satellite factory, a self-sustaining Moon city, a path to 1 billion daily active X users, and a company restructuring into four product teams. The meeting was later posted publicly on X.

Elon Musk held an all-hands meeting with xAI employees on Tuesday night, just hours after co-founders Yuhuai (Tony) Wu and Jimmy Ba announced they were leaving the company. What followed was a 45-minute presentation that veered from product updates to lunar manufacturing plants.The meeting came at a sensitive moment. Wu and Ba are the fifth and sixth members of xAI’s 12-person founding team to walk out the door, with five departures in the past year alone. Rather than dwell on the exits, Musk used the stage to lay out a series of ambitious promises for the company’s future.

Musk wants to build an AI satellite factory on the Moon

The headline promise was a lunar facility that would manufacture AI-powered satellites and launch them into deep space using electromagnetic catapults, or “mass drivers.” Musk painted a picture of satellites firing off the Moon’s surface one after another, beaming data back to Earth or running compute locally. “You have to go to the moon,” he told employees. He described the Moon’s low gravity, lack of atmosphere, and constant solar exposure as ideal conditions for this kind of infrastructure.

A self-sustaining lunar city before Mars

Musk also outlined a stepping-stone approach to his long-standing Mars obsession. First, xAI and SpaceX would establish what he called “a self-sustaining city on the moon,” then push outward to Mars, and eventually to other star systems. He even floated the idea of finding “remnants of ancient alien civilizations” along the way.

X is gunning for 1 billion daily active users

Back on Earth, Musk shared that X currently has around 600 million monthly active users and set a target of “well over a billion” daily active users. To get there, the company is planning new features including X Money, a banking tool, and a standalone chat app. Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, added that the platform had just crossed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue from subscriptions.

xAI is being restructured into four product teams

Musk acknowledged the co-founder departures as part of a broader reorganisation. The company is now split into four teams: Grok (the chatbot), a coding division, the Imagine video generator, and a project called Macrohard—described as a system that can “do anything on a computer that a computer is able to do.” Toby Pohlen, who will lead Macrohard, told colleagues the goal is to have “rocket engines fully designed by AI.“The all-hands was later published as a video on X, possibly in response to The New York Times reporting details from the meeting earlier that evening. SpaceX completed its acquisition of xAI last week in a deal valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, with an IPO expected as early as June.