Elon Musk gathered the entire team for a company-wide xAI town hall at his artificial intelligence venture, fresh off its newly completed merger with SpaceX.
In a surprising twist, Musk chose to broadcast the entire 45-minute session publicly, opening the doors for all to watch.
Here’s what we learnt:
The restructure
Earlier this week, xAI saw the departure of two of its co-founders. Tony Wu announced on X/Twitter that it was “time for my next chapter.”
Just a day later, fellow co-founder Jimmy Ba also confirmed he was stepping away, thanking Musk for “bringing us together on this incredible journey.”
When the company first launched, it had 12 members. That number has since dropped to six.
Musk said the company is now “organising the company to be more effective at this scale”.
“Now, naturally, when this happens, there are some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages,” he added.
X/Twitter updates
The meeting touched on X updates, with claims that the platform reached one billion users and made a further $1 billion a year from X Premium subscriptions.
X’s product chief, Nikita Bier, highlighted that people are spending 55 per cent more time on the app than six months ago.
There are currently no plans to include ads in Grok, following the news that OpenAI has started rolling out ads on ChatGPT.
Standalone chat app
Musk shared his plans to launch XChat, an app that allows users to message without actually having to go on the X app.
There will also be another financial app called XMoney.
“For XMoney, we actually had XMoney live in closed beta within the company, and we expect in the next month or two to go to a limited external beta and then to go worldwide to all X users,” he shared.
He suggests the app will be a “game changer” as it’s “really intended to be the place where all the money is, the central source of all monetary transactions”.
Aliens and sci-fi predictions
Discussing the merger between xAI and SpaceX, Musk laid out ambitious plans that sounded pulled from the pages of science fiction: AI-powered satellite manufacturing hubs on the Moon and a futuristic mechanism to hurl those satellites into deep space.
Under his vision, the newly unified company would first establish a sustained presence on the Moon and eventually expand to Mars, a goal he now places roughly 20 years out.
“Maybe we’ll meet aliens. Maybe we’ll see some civilisations that lasted for millions of years,” Musk shared. “And we’ll find the remnants of ancient alien civilisations. But the only way we’re gonna do that is if we go out there and we explore. And this is a path to making it happen”.
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