xAI lays out interplanetary ambitions in public all-hands

<p id="speakable-summary" class="wp-block-paragraph">On Wednesday, xAI took the rare step of publishing a full 45-minute all-hands meeting video on X, making it publicly accessible. Details of the Tuesday night meeting were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/technology/elon-musk-lunar-factory.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">previously reported by The New York Times</a>, which may have influenced xAI’s decision to post the video online.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The full video reveals significant new details about Musk’s plans for the AI lab, including its product roadmap and its ongoing ties to the X platform.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The most immediate revelation concerned a string of departing employees, which Musk described as layoffs resulting from a changing organizational structure at the company. While reorganizations are common, the breadth of the departures has caused significant confusion, particularly as it has meant the loss of a significant portion of the founding team.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve,” Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2021673886157607383" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">said on X</a>. “This unfortunately required parting ways with some people. We wish them well in future endeavors.”</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The new organizational system splits xAI into four primary teams: one focused on the Grok chatbot (including voice), another for the app’s coding system, another for the Imagine video generator, and finally a team focused on the Macrohard project, which spans from simple computer use simulation to modeling entire corporations.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“[Macrohard] is able to do anything on a computer that a computer is able to do,” Toby Pohlen, who will lead the project under the new organizational structure, told his colleagues. “There should be rocket engines fully designed by AI.”</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The all-hands also featured claims about new usage and revenue figures for xAI and X. Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said X had “just crossed” $1 billion in annual recurring revenue from subscriptions, which he attributed to a marketing push during the holidays.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Additionally, executives said the xAI’s Imagine tool is generating 50 million videos a day, and more than 6 billion images over the past 30 days, according to their internal metrics.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">But it’s difficult to separate those figures from <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/15/us-senators-demand-answers-from-x-meta-alphabet-on-sexualized-deepfakes/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the flood of deepfake pornography</a> that overtook X during that same period. The X platform <a href="https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2008444770071298397" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">saw engagement skyrocket</a> as AI-generated explicit images became more prevalent, and with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/technology/grok-x-ai-elon-musk-deepfakes.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">an estimated 1.8 million sexualized images</a> generated over just nine days, the image-generation figures likely include substantial amounts of this controversial content.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The most eye-catching part of the presentation came at the end, when Musk reemphasized the importance of space-based data centers <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/11/why-the-economics-of-orbital-ai-are-so-brutal/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">despite the technical challenges involved</a>. Musk went still further, envisioning a moon-based factory for AI satellites, including a lunar mass driver — essentially an electromagnetic catapult — to launch them. With such infrastructure, Musk said, one could launch an AI cluster capable of capturing significant portions of the sun’s total energy output or even expanding to other galaxies.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about,” Musk said, “but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”</p>