Elon Musk is making a big bet on his future vision – will it work?

Elon Musk is a busy man who runs several billion dollar companies. While he’s an increasingly divisive figure, there’s no doubt that Tesla and SpaceX, his two most important ventures, have done much to advance the future of electric cars and spaceships, respectively. But a series of corporate moves this week suggests Musk has a new vision for the future — and he may be bringing all his companies together to get there.

First, Musk’s electric car company Tesla announced that it did stoppage of production two of its flagships, the Model S and the Model X. The decision does not mean that Tesla will stop making vehicles entirely, but the factories for the two models will now be converted to facilities for the production of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots. At the same time, Tesla said it would invest $2 billion in xAI, another Musk company that owns the social media site. chatbot, Grok.

Taken together, this suggests that Tesla is shifting its priorities toward more AI-intensive activities, which is where the next big reveal comes into play. According to reports from Bloomberg and ReutersMusk plans to merge SpaceX with Tesla or xAI — or perhaps even both — as part of a plan to take the space firm public this year.

So what could Musk hope to achieve by consolidating his business empire? “By merging xAI and SpaceX, Musk is likely looking to optimize resources across data streams, energy and computing,” he says Merv Hickok at the University of Michigan. “He was also looking at the possibility of a merger with Tesla to take advantage of everyone [vehicle] as a distributed computing resource.”

Tesla’s planned future in humanoid robots — Musk said this week that he wants to produce 1 million units of the third-generation Optimus robot a year from his newly rebuilt Tesla factory — looks like it will need a lot of AI computing resources. Interacting with the built environment alongside humans, humanoid robot advocates hope, requires special AI models to sift through lots of data.

But the generative revolution of artificial intelligence is already stretching energy reserves to their limits. Musk’s xAI was recently censored by the US Environmental Protection Agency for violating legal energy production limits for its Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee. He’s also talked about the need to put data centers in space before: at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Musk called the idea a “no brainer” and said full deployment is possible within two or three years. It should be noted that others are less optimistic about these proposals, as a number of technical difficulties, from cooling to radiation protection, must first be resolved.

Those objections aside, getting data centers into orbit means launching them—and SpaceX is one of the most reliable suppliers of rockets and launches to both the private and public sectors, and also has experience with satellite orbits through its Internet arm Starlink.

“SpaceX is putting networks of satellites into space — they have 9,000 already — and those networks are about distributing the Internet,” he says Robert Scobletechnology analyst Unaligned. “xAI is about internet distribution and intelligence, but it’s really about creating new kinds of artificial intelligence models to drive our cars, our humanoid robots, and our lives.” He says that “bringing the two together makes a lot of sense.”

In other words, Musk seems to believe that the combination of SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI will allow him to dominate the future of AI in a way that competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft will find hard to match. None of the three companies responded to a request for comment, as did Musk himself.

However, not everyone agrees with what the plans are. “They all lack the economics, except for Tesla, which is going in the wrong direction to fund their growth,” he says. Edward Niedermeyerauthor Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors. He sees the decision as a “defensive” move designed to support their future – and to attract a wider range of funding from public investors.

That public investor cash will be vital, Niedermeyer believes, because of the pace at which Musk’s companies are moving reported ongoing cash is significant: the cost of training and then running AI models is expensive, as many AI companies are finding. “It has to burn through an insane amount of money,” Niedermeyer says—so Musk may be hoping that by putting all his eggs in one easily investable basket, his vision will be attractive enough to get people to part with their funds. If not—or if its predicted future doesn’t come true—it may all come crashing back down to Earth.

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