Has Elon Musk (일론 머스크) abandoned Tesla’s master plan, an electrified economy and a vision for solar energy? SpaceX IPO filings released this week make it look that way, TechCrunch reported on May 23.

Tesla has released its master plan four times over several years. The consistent core has been electrifying the economy. In the first master plan, Musk said, “The purpose of Tesla is to accelerate the advent of a solar electric economy, compared to the mining and burning hydrocarbon economy.”

Reality is different. xAI, led by Musk, runs data centres on dozens of unregulated natural gas turbines. xAI also plans to buy an additional $2.8 billion worth. A manager who built a business empire on clean energy appears to be relying on fossil fuels, TechCrunch reported.

Musk has no qualms about transactions between companies he owns. SpaceX spent $131 million on 1,279 Cybertrucks, and xAI has spent $697 million on Tesla Megapacks, large-scale battery storage systems, over the past two years. xAI has never bought solar panels from Tesla at any meaningful scale.

In the SpaceX filings, solar power is focused on space. Ground-based solar is mentioned only as a comparison to show how much better space solar is, not as a power source for xAI’s data centres. SpaceX claims its space-based solar arrays can produce “more than 5 times the energy” of ground-based systems thanks to 24-hour sunlight.

Musk appears to see xAI’s current data centre as a stopgap. His concept is to scrap ground facilities once SpaceX can put gigawatt-class servers into orbit. But he could be wrong, TechCrunch reported.

The SpaceX filings submitted to the SEC repeatedly mention “annual terawatt-scale AI computing growth.” It is a striking figure, given global data centres currently use about 40 gigawatts. Musk back-calculated based on the assumption that the world will need additional terawatt-scale computing every year.

Humans currently use about 35,000 terawatt-hours of energy a year. AI energy demand could grow exponentially or it could slow. It is not possible to know at this point, but Musk’s style is to spot trends at inflection points and place bold bets.

But hauling solar panels on trucks typically takes less energy than putting them into orbit. Space-grade solar panels would also have to be produced at an unprecedented scale.

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TechCrunch said, “There is still a lot of room to use solar energy on Earth. Just 3 years ago, Musk declared in Tesla Master Plan Part 3 that he would ‘eliminate fossil fuels.’ If so, it may be in order to first change xAI’s data centre that runs on natural gas.”