On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered xAI employees for an all-hands meeting. Apparently he wanted to discuss the future of his AI company, and in particular, how it relates to the moon.

According to The New York Times, which reports that it heard the meetingMusk told employees that xAI needed a moon manufacturing facility, a lunar factory that would make AI satellites and launch them into space via a giant catapult. “You should go to the moon,” he said, to the Times. The move, he explained, will help xAI use more computing power than any rival. “It’s hard to imagine what an intelligence on that scale would think,” he added, “but it’s exciting to see it happen.”

What Musk doesn’t seem to have clearly addressed is how it will be built, or how he plans to reorganize the newly merged company. xAI-SpaceX entity that is simultaneously handling a potentially historic IPO. He acknowledges, proudly, that the company is growing. “If you’re moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you’re going to be the leader,” he told employees, per the Times, “and xAI is moving faster than any other company — nobody’s even close.” He added that “if this happens, there are some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages.”

It’s not clear what prompted all the hands, but the timing, whatever the reason for it, is at least strange. On Monday night, xAI co-founder Tony Wu announced that he was leaving. Less than a day later, another xAI co-founder, Jimmy Ba, who reports directly to Musk, said he also bounced. That brings the total to six of xAI’s 12 founding members have now left the young company. The divisions are all described as copacetic, and have a SpaceX IPO reportedly targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation as soon as this summer, all involved stand to be in excellent financial shape as they walk out the door.

The moon itself is a new concern. For most of SpaceX’s 24-year existence, Mars was the end game. This past Sunday, before the Super Bowl, Musk surprised many, posting that SpaceX is “shifting the focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon,” arguing that a colony on Mars would last “20+ years.” The moon, he said, will reach there in half an hour.

It’s a big change in direction for a company that has yet to send a mission to the moon.

Justifiably or otherwise, investors seem more excited about data centers in orbit than colonies on other planets. (Even for the most patient buck in the room, that’s a long timeline.) But to at least one xAI venture backer who spoke to this editor last year, the lunar ambitions have nothing to do with Wall Street and are not a distraction from xAI’s core mission; they are inseparable from it.

The theory, outlined by the VC at the time, is that Musk is building towards one goal from the beginning: the most powerful model in the world, an AI trained not only on text and images but on proprietary real-world data that no competitor can copy. Tesla contributes to energy systems and road topology. Neuralink offers a window into the brain. SpaceX provides physics and orbital mechanics. The Boring Company added some underground data. Add a moon factory to the mix and you start to see the outline of something very powerful.

Whether that vision can be achieved is a big question. Another is whether it is legal. Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no country – and by extension, no company – can claim sovereignty over the moon. But the 2015 US law opened a significant loophole – while you can’t own the moon, you can own whatever you get from it. As Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of science and technology studies at Wesleyan University, explained to TechCrunch last monththe difference is somewhat false. “It’s like saying you can’t own the house, but you can own the boards and the beams,” he said. “Because the things that are on the moon is the the moon.”

That legal framework is the scaffolding on which Musk’s lunar ambitions apparently rest, although not everyone agrees to play by the rules (China and Russia certainly don’t). Meanwhile, as the team that was supposed to help him get there continues to dwindle, it is not clear who will help him in this adventure or if, as soon as possible, his latest all-hands answers more questions than it raises.