Elon Musk Hopes His New Factory Will Help AI Supplant Life on Earth

The world’s richest man has a vision of the universe’s future with little role for humanity—and is rushing ahead to have his AI company build it.

Elon Musk said in an X post on Sunday that a huge semiconductor factory planned by Tesla and SpaceX in Texas will have an output of at least $1 trillion—rivaling the GDP of some of the world’s larger economies.

Musk has made similarly grandiose projections that are, depending on one’s interpretation, somewhere between ambitious and absurd. He has a long track record of overpromising. In recent SEC litigation, in fact, Tesla’s legal team resorted to arguing that his exaggerations are “corporate puffery.”

The Terafab project, which recently broke ground 70 miles northwest of Houston, is planned to build chips for Tesla cars and humanoid robots, and for the newly-merged SpaceX and xAI. Currently, the design of advanced AI chips is dominated by Nvidia, and their fabrication by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Musk’s famously erratic statements should be taken with a heaping of salt. But his companies do build more electric vehicles than any domestic competitors, and are responsible for the majority of launches into orbit in recent years. So it’s worth wondering: what vision of the future does Musk want his Texas chip plant to help build?

“We aspire to be a galactic civilization,” Terafab’s site says, and “harness all the energy in a galaxy.” But Musk’s recent statements raise a question about who, exactly, the “we” is—including a post he made last week that “Propagating super intelligence to the stars is a great success condition for a biological bootloader.”

A rough translation of what he seems to mean: humanity would fulfill its cosmic purpose by building AI—under Musk’s leadership—that tramples us all on its way to colonizing the universe.

Musk once professed to oppose such ideas, including when he helped found OpenAI with the stated mission to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.” But AI successionism—the belief that humans are merely a stepping-stone in cosmic evolution on the way to a “worthy successor”—is a growing movement, now with more support from a man with unimaginable wealth and power. xAI did not immediately respond to a query on whether AI successionism represents company policy. 

For now, the coming of a machine-god that devours its creators and colonizes the stars is still just a prophecy, feared by some and much anticipated by others. That vision of humanity would probably have served as little consolation to the 780,000 real, breathing people estimated to have died in the first year of DOGE’s cuts to foreign aid.