Elon Musk’s AI company has lost half its founders – and now he wants to send it to space

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has lost half of its co-founders – and now the billionaire wants to catapult it into space.

xAI co-founders Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba said on X, formerly Twitter, that they had left the company. That leaves it with only half the founders that were present when it launched less than three years ago.

Neither explained their departure, and both thanked Mr Musk. But it adds to turmoil at the company, which was recently merged with SpaceX ahead of an expected public listing later this year.

Shortly after his colleagues announced their departure, and with no indication that it was necessarily related, Mr Musk announced that he would like to catapult artificial intelligence satellites into space and towards the Moon.

“You have to go to the moon,” he said during a meeting with employees, which was first reported by the New York Times, suggesting that leaving the Earth would allow for more powerful artificial intelligence. “It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about, but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”

To get there, Mr Musk said that he hopes to build a catapult, called a “mass driver”, which would fling the satellites into space and eventually allow for the company to build a lunar base. That in turn would provide energy for a fleet of space satellites used to give more computing power to its AI systems, he suggested.

Mr Musk has long been primarily focused on Mars, and eventually building a colony there. The Moon has for him and SpaceX been primarily a way of making it easier to travel to the red planet.

But in recent times he appears to have adjusted that focus onto the Moon. He has posted a run of tweets suggesting that SpaceX has changed its primary objective.

During the meeting, however, Mr Musk suggested that he was still hoping to build a “self-sustaining city on Mars” that could itself be a stop on the way towards exploring the rest of the universe and looking for alien life, he said.