Elon Musk’s latest promises: Moon cities and space catapults

For most companies, an all-hands meeting is when the CEO asks everyone to “lean in.” For Elon Musk’s companies, it’s when the CEO asks everyone to lean lunar.

At a recent xAI meeting heard by The New York Times, Musk floated a plan that sounds like a late-night whiteboard session that got loose and wandered into space-age real estate. xAI, he suggested, may eventually need a factory on the moon to build AI satellites, and a giant electromagnetic mass driver — a space catapult — to launch them into orbit. His reasoning, at least as reported, was simple and stark. “You have to go to the moon,” Musk said.

The lunar talk fits a broader shift in Musk-world. 

Over the weekend, he posted on X $TWTR that SpaceX has “already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon,” arguing it could happen “in less than 10 years,” while Mars would take “20-plus years.” He added, “The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars.” This amounts to a major walk-back for Musk, who once aimed to get a spacecraft to Mars by 2026. The mission language hasn’t exactly changed, but the map has: The red planet is still the aspiration; the gray one is the near-term construction site.

The mass driver piece is the most technically legible part of the pitch, even if it still belongs to the genre of infrastructure-as-aspiration. A mass driver is an electromagnetic launcher, essentially a very long, very powerful track that accelerates payloads to extreme speed and flings them off-world. The moon’s lack of atmosphere and lower gravity make the idea more plausible there than on Earth, and the concept has lived for decades in serious space engineering discussions.

What’s less clear is what, exactly, gets built first.

A “factory on the moon” could mean a tiny assembly shed with imported parts, or it could mean an industrial supply chain that mines, refines, manufactures, repairs, and expands — the kind of self-reliance implied by “self-growing city.” The second version isn’t a project plan so much as a new branch of civilization, complete with power systems, life support, redundancy, and the unglamorous reality of fixing broken things when the nearest hardware store is, oh, 238,000 miles away.

“It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about,” Musk reportedly said, ‘but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”

And then there’s the other promise from the same meeting: Well over one billion daily users on X. Musk reportedly told staff the platform has about 600 million monthly active users and talked up a future built on payments and other services. Independent estimates suggest a much smaller daily footprint today; Similarweb data reported by The Verge pegged X at about 125 million daily active mobile users globally and roughly 145.4 million daily web visitors, with total daily users described as over 270 million.

Put all of Musk’s claims together, and you can see the shape of his newest pitch: grow the app, build the compute, chase the power, and if Earth gets annoying about any of it, move the bottleneck to the moon. It’s audacious, cohesive, and very Musk — a vision where the hardest part of scaling AI is, somehow, lunar zoning.