Image Credits:SpaceX There was just one problem with SpaceX and Mars: No one wanted to pay them to go there. Plans announced in 2016 to repurpose the company’s Dragon spacecraft as a Mars lander were abandoned the next year after the technical challenges became too costly. And since Musk unveiled the vehicle that would become Starship in 2016, its capabilities, initially intended for Mars colonization, have been scaled back to focus on two more remunerative tasks: Launching satellites for the Starlink comms network and $4 billion worth of contracts to land astronauts on the moon for NASA. Unlike a multi-planetary civilization, there may be some logic in having SpaceX purchase a money-burning AI and social media to build data centers in Earth orbit, particularly if forecasts of rising demand and costs on the ground come true. Experts suggest that it might be possible in the 2030s. Hypothetically, building satellites on the moon would require a lot more of Musk’s other dreams coming true first. Scientists and start-ups are experimenting with building chips and other precision components in space. But mass-producing many tons of advanced computers on the moon means we’re living in a universe where it is dramatically cheaper to get to space, which is the central requirement for those technologies, getting all the raw materials for such an effort to the moon, plus whatever is required for a “self-sustaining city.” In a sense, that’s the point: This is the, uh, stretch goal. If meme-happy retail investors buy the argument, they could turn SpaceX shares into the next Tesla. The engineers, AI or aerospace, who Musk needs to achieve his goals may find the shift jarring. But the vision is one way to explain what xAi is about, other than an LLM perhaps best known as a pervert. As one of the company’s departing executives said on his way out the door, “all AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it’s boring.” Mass-producing a solar system-scale supercomputer on the moon is many things (I’m going to get emails for not using the word “insane”), but it is not the exact same thing, and it is not boring. Topics