Musk Unveils xAI Overhaul, Lunar AI Ambitions
In a rare public all-hands release, the billionaire outlined layoffs, a four-team restructure, surging generative metrics and plans for moon-based AI satellites.
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Elon Musk used a companywide meeting on Tuesday night to outline a restructuring at xAI, disclose internal performance metrics and sketch out plans for space-based artificial intelligence infrastructure, including lunar manufacturing of AI satellites.
In an unusual move, Musk released the full 45-minute recording of the internal all-hands session on X.
The meeting confirmed recent staffing changes, including the departure of several employees, among them members of the founding team. Musk described the exits as part of an organizational overhaul driven by rapid expansion.
“As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve,” Musk said. “This unfortunately required parting ways with some people. We wish them well in future endeavors.”
He added that speed is decisive in technology competition. “If you’re moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you will be the leader,” Musk said, telling employees that xAI is moving faster than competitors. He also noted that different stages of a company require different strengths, saying some people are better suited to early phases than later ones.
Under the new structure, xAI will operate across four primary teams.
One group is dedicated to the Grok chatbot, including voice capabilities.
Another focuses on the app’s coding system. A third oversees the Imagine video generator. The fourth team leads a project known as Macrohard.
Macrohard is intended to automate a wide range of computer based tasks. Toby Pohlen, who will lead the initiative, described it in sweeping terms.
“[Macrohard] is able to do anything on a computer that a computer is able to do,” he said. “There should be rocket engines fully designed by AI.”
Executives said the system could scale from simple computer use simulation to modeling entire corporations.
The meeting also included new usage and revenue figures.
Nikita Bier, head of product at X, said the platform has “just crossed” $1 billion in annual recurring revenue from subscriptions, attributing the milestone to a holiday marketing push.
Executives further stated that xAI’s Imagine tool is generating approximately 50 million videos per day and that more than 6 billion images were produced over the past 30 days, according to internal metrics.
The most ambitious portion of the session focused on space based computing. Musk reiterated his support for orbiting data centers and described plans for a factory on the moon that would build AI satellites.
He referenced the potential use of a lunar mass driver, an electromagnetic catapult, to launch those satellites into space.
“You have to go to the moon,” Musk told employees.
With infrastructure positioned beyond Earth, Musk said AI clusters could capture significant portions of the sun’s energy output.
“It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about,” he said, “but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”
