Mars or the moon or AI? Elon Musk’s changing goals for SpaceX

LOS ANGELES – For years, SpaceX’s mission was clear: Get humans to Mars.

“The most powerful thing we could do is establish a second, self-sustaining civilisation outside of Earth,” SpaceX’s chief executive officer Elon Musk told Forbes in 2003, a year after founding the company.

“And the only place that’s really feasible is Mars.”

As a reminder of that goal, SpaceX has a mural in a cafe at its Hawthorne, California, campus featuring the progression of human settlement on the Red Planet. The company also sells “Occupy Mars” T-shirts, which Mr Musk has regularly worn in public.

But over the last six months, Mr Musk has shifted SpaceX’s priorities. Though the tech mogul once forecast that humans would take off for Mars as early as 2024, he has de-emphasised reaching the planet.

Instead, SpaceX on April 21 said it had struck a deal with artificial intelligence start-up Cursor that could result in its acquiring the young company for US$60 billion (S$76.56 billion).

And Mr Musk, 54, has proposed other moonshots that could drive more attention and investment to SpaceX as it prepares for one of the largest-ever initial public offerings.

Among his pronouncements are AI data centres that could orbit Earth, moon-based factories and an AI chip manufacturing plant, all of which will contribute to a utopian future where humans never have to work, he has said.

This week, some investors and fund managers are expected to get a closer view of those plans when they visit SpaceX’s facilities in Texas and Tennessee before the IPO, one person who was invited said. Some investors were also scheduled to visit SpaceX’s Hawthorne campus next week, the person said.

The changing goals have caused whiplash.

“It’s a hallucinogenic business plan,” said CEO Ross Gerber of Gerber Kawasaki, an investment firm that owns SpaceX shares. He added that Musk “has lost his mind” as he tries to drum up excitement for the public offering.

Shifting aims before an IPO would be unthinkable for most corporate leaders, who tend to focus on their core businesses and try to project steadiness to potential investors.

Mr Musk’s new goals for SpaceX raise questions about how much shareholders can rely on his word, corporate governance experts said. Yet the billionaire has an uncanny ability to bring investors along for the ride, they said.

“In most other corporations where the CEO makes promises that do not prove out, investors tend to react in an adverse way, and they usually do not last long,” said Boston College law professor Brian Quinn. But with Musk, he said “people believe him or want to believe him”.

In online posts, Mr Musk has acknowledged SpaceX’s “priority shift”. But he has said the new goals do not take away from the Mars plan and are stepping stones to making humans a multiplanetary species.

“The capabilities we unlock by making space-based data centres a reality will fund and enable self-growing bases on the moon, an entire civilisation on Mars and ultimately expansion to the universe,” Mr Musk wrote in a February letter to SpaceX employees.

Mr Musk has a history of making bold predictions that do not materialise. But while his timelines can be imprecise, his long-term visions have delivered huge opportunities, his supporters said.

“Elon is always directionally correct,” said Space X investor Peter Diamandis, who is also the founder of the XPrize Foundation, a non-profit that supports technological development.

“His time frames may be off, but he’ll eventually get there.”

Mr Musk and a SpaceX spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Over the years, Mr Musk has acknowledged his lack of business plans and his reliance on gut instinct.

Eight former SpaceX executives and employees, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution, told The New York Times that during their times at the company, they had become accustomed to Mr Musk’s whipsaw directives and his use of social media to make announcements or product changes.

In 2014, Mr Musk announced on Twitter, now known as X, that SpaceX would hold an event to unveil the second version of its Dragon capsule, a spacecraft meant to ferry passengers and cargo from orbit, two former employees said.

The vehicle was not near completion, so his team scrambled to pull together a full design and event, the former employees said.

“We want to take a big step in technology and really create something that was a step change in spacecraft technology,” Mr Musk said at the event, where he unveiled a vehicle that could land anywhere on Earth using jet propulsion. (SpaceX later scrapped the idea in favour of parachute-based landing after Mr Musk determined that Dragon’s jet propulsion was not practical, three of the people told the Times.)

That same year, Mr Musk became interested in satellite-based internet and began meeting with satellite start-up OneWeb founder Greg Wyler, said two people familiar with the discussions, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution.

The relationship never came to fruition, and Mr Musk set out on his own, opening a SpaceX engineering office in Redmond, Washington, in 2015 to develop internet satellites.

The resulting service, Starlink, underwent layoffs as SpaceX invested in research and development. But the bet paid off: Starlink now has 10 million subscribers and generated US$8 billion in sales in 2024, according to documents obtained by the Times.

Now Mr Musk appears to be trying to replicate the Starlink playbook, but with data centres in space.

SpaceX had not previously focused on AI, much less on orbital data centres, three of the former SpaceX executives said. But after Google and others began discussing orbital data centres in 2025, Mr Musk declared in October that “SpaceX will be doing this”.

In January, SpaceX filed paperwork with the Federal Communications Commission to potentially launch one million satellites for an “orbital data centre system”. A week later, it announced a merger with xAI, Mr Musk’s AI start-up.

“In 36 months, but probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be in space,” Mr Musk said in a recent podcast appearance.

In 2026, more than 20 engineers and researchers have left xAI, whose products have lagged behind those of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in use.

Mr Musk appears eager to push SpaceX further into AI. In the deal with Cursor announced on April 21, SpaceX said the combination with the young AI company, which makes code-writing software, would “allow us to build the world’s most useful” AI models.

Another new goal is the moon. While two of the former SpaceX executives said Mr Musk had previously dismissed landing on the moon because it was not a new achievement, he said in February that the company had “shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the moon”.

With the success of NASA’s recent Artemis II mission and the agency’s commitment to further moon exploration, Mr Musk may see an immediate financial opportunity, the former SpaceX executives said. NYTIMES