Elon Musk has had another bright idea – catapulting satellites from the moon.
Musk told staff at xAI, his start-up that recently merged with his rocket company SpaceX, about his plans to build a lunar AI satellite factory.
The billionaire isn’t quite imagining astronauts wheeling out a wooden, medieval-style catapult – he wants to build a mass driver.
The sci-fi-sounding space launcher, also called an electromagnetic catapult, would create magnetic pulses that shove payloads sky-high.
According to The New York Times, Musk said at an all-hands meeting: ‘You have to go to the moon.’
The Tesla chief added that this is step one of a three-step plan: build ‘a self-sustaining city on the moon’, colonise Mars and then explore the cosmos to find aliens.
‘If you’re moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you will be the leader, and xAI is moving faster than any other company — no one’s even close,’ Musk added.
‘Because we’ve reached a certain scale, we’re organising the company to be more effective at this scale.
‘And actually, when this happens, there’s some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages.’
He said in a post on X yesterday that some xAI staff were laid off as the company was ‘reorganised a few days ago’.
While Musk spoke highly of lunar missions at the meeting, he has previously criticised them as a ‘distraction’ from going to Mars.
Elon Musk’s plans on Earth
Musk does have some Earth-bound objectives. The Times reported that he is planning to launch an X banking app as well as a chat app.
‘We’ll obviously give people reasons, compelling reasons, to use the app every day and have, my expectation is, well over a billion daily active users,’ he said in the meeting.
X has around 557 million monthly users, making it the 15th most popular social media network, according to DataReportal.
The meeting comes just a week after Musk said that the deal made the world’s most valued company in the world at more than $1.25 trillion, was done all in the name of bringing AI to the stars.
Musk said he wants to launch AI data centres into space to harness solar power as ‘it’s always sunny in space’.
He also wants to ‘make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars’, but didn’t elaborate on what he means.
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