Elon Musk is making an enormous wager on his future imaginative and prescient – will it work?

Elon Musk is a busy man, heading up a number of billion-dollar corporations. Whereas he’s more and more a divisive determine, there isn’t any doubt that Tesla and SpaceX, his two most vital ventures, have executed a lot to advance the way forward for electrical vehicles and spacecraft, respectively. However a sequence of company strikes this week suggests Musk has a brand new imaginative and prescient of the long run – and he could also be combining all his corporations to get there.

First, Musk’s electrical automobile firm, Tesla, introduced that it was halting manufacturing of two of its flagship autos, the Mannequin S and Mannequin X. The choice doesn’t imply Tesla will cease making autos altogether, however the factories for these two fashions will now be repurposed right into a facility to provide Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots. On the similar time, Tesla stated it will make investments $2 billion in xAI, one other Musk agency that owns the social media web site X and its controversial chatbot, Grok.

Put collectively, it means that Tesla is shifting priorities in the direction of extra AI-intensive actions, which is the place the subsequent main revelation comes into play. Based on reporting by Bloomberg and Reuters, Musk is planning to merge SpaceX with Tesla or xAI – or even perhaps each – as a part of a plan to checklist the house agency on the inventory market this yr.

So, what may Musk be hoping to attain by means of consolidating his enterprise empire? “By merging xAI and SpaceX, Musk is probably going searching for useful resource optimisation throughout knowledge flows, power and computing,” says Merve Hickok on the College of Michigan. “He had additionally entertained the opportunity of a merger with Tesla to make use of every [vehicle] as a distributed computing useful resource.”

The calculation seems to be that Tesla’s deliberate future in humanoid robots – Musk stated this week that he desires to provide 1 million models of the third-generation Optimus robotic per yr from his newly transformed Tesla manufacturing unit – will want a number of computing sources for AI. Interplay with a built-up setting alongside individuals, as humanoid robotic adherents hope will occur, requires specialist AI fashions to crunch by means of numerous knowledge.

However the generative AI revolution is already stretching power provides to their restrict. Musk’s xAI was just lately censured by the US Environmental Safety Company for breaching authorized limits of energy technology for its Colossus knowledge centre in Memphis, Tennessee. He has additionally beforehand spoken about the necessity to put knowledge centres in house: on the current World Financial Discussion board in Davos, Switzerland, Musk known as the concept a “no-brainer” and stated full-scale deployment was potential inside two or three years. It ought to be famous that others are much less bullish on these proposals, as a number of technical difficulties from cooling to radiation safety should be solved first.

These objections apart, getting knowledge centres into orbit means launching them – and SpaceX is among the most dependable suppliers of rockets and launches to the personal and public sectors, in addition to being skilled in satellite tv for pc orbits, because of its Starlink web arm.

“SpaceX is placing grids of satellites up in house – they have already got 9000 – and people grids are about web distribution,” says Robert Scoble, a expertise analyst Unaligned. “xAI is doing web distribution and information, however they’re actually about constructing new sorts of AI fashions to run our vehicles, our humanoid robots, and our lives.” He says that “including these two collectively makes a number of sense”.

In different phrases, Musk appears to imagine that combining SpaceX, Tesla and xAI will let him dominate the way forward for AI in a approach that will probably be troublesome for opponents like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft to match. Not one of the three corporations responded to a request for remark, nor did Musk himself.

Nonetheless, not everybody agrees that’s what’s behind the plans. “All of them lack the economics, except Tesla, which is heading within the flawed path, to fund their development,” says Edward Niedermeyer, creator of Ludicrous: The unvarnished story of Tesla motors. He sees the choice as a “defensive” transfer designed to shore up their futures – and to interact a wider vary of financing from public traders.

That public investor money will probably be very important, reckons Niedermeyer, due to the speed at which Musk’s corporations are reportedly operating by means of money is important: the price of coaching after which operating AI fashions is pricey, as many AI corporations are discovering. “It has to burn simply insane quantities of money,” says Niedermeyer – and so Musk could also be hoping that placing all of his eggs into one readily investable basket will make his imaginative and prescient engaging sufficient for individuals to half with their funds. If not – or if his envisioned future fails to return to fruition – it could all come crashing again to Earth.