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Billionaire resigns CEO role to pay, train for SpaceX’s first crewed Starship Moon launch
Eccentric Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — known for collecting modern art and founding online fashion retailer Zozo — has stepped down as CEO to free up time and money for his privately-chartered launch around the moon.
Set to launch no earlier than 2023 on what is expected to be SpaceX’s first crewed, circumlunar Starship launch, Maezawa stated in September 2018 that he had arranged to pay SpaceX a huge amount of money (likely several hundred million dollars) for that right. Along with resigning as CEO of Zozo, Maezawa will sell ~85% of his 36% stake to Yahoo Japan, giving the conglomerate a 50.1% ownership stake of Zozo and Maezawa a $2.3 billion cash windfall.
As noted by Business Insider, when asked by a follower if he had any money after an announcement that he would sell off a portion of his extensive art collection in a Sotheby’s auction, Maezawa admitted that he frequently has “no money” because he spends it “right away”, inadvisable but admittedly in-line with his eccentric reputation.
The resignation and sale comes just weeks after SpaceX successfully completed Starhopper’s second and final launch, reaching an altitude of ~150m (500 ft) with the power of a single Raptor engine. During a September 2018 SpaceX press event, Maezawa announced that he had come to an agreement with the company to buy the entirety of Starship’s first crewed mission around the Moon. The billionaire’s motivation: gifting the 8-10 available ‘seats’ to some of the best artists in the world in a project known as dearMoon.
At the same event, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk estimated that the company’s Starship program would cost anwhere from $2B- $10B and confirmed that the bulk of Maezawa’s contributions would go directly towards the rocket’s development costs. Business Insider also quotes Musk as stating that “[Maezawa is] paying a lot of money that would help with the ship and its booster – ultimately paying for the average citizen to travel to other planets.” Alongside Yusaku’s frank Twitter acknowledgment that he may not be the most financially responsible individual and repeated indications that he is extremely proud of Zozo, it’s safe to surmise that the decision to resign was not easily made.
More likely than not, now that SpaceX has completed its Starhopper flight program and is on the verge of its first Starship prototype flight tests, Maezawa simply needs money – and a huge amount of it – to continue fulfilling his contractual commitment to SpaceX. Even if a significant portion of the $2.2-2.3B cash payout he is set to receive goes to settling old debts, the Japanese billionaire should now have more than enough assets to fully fund his SpaceX contract.
At the time, SpaceX had partially completed pieces of the megarocket – then referred to as BFR – in a makeshift development facility at the Port of Los Angeles, pictured above with Maezawa. Since then, SpaceX has renamed the rocket to Starship, drastically redesigned it, and relocated all production operations to Hawthorne, CA, Boca Chica, Texas, and Cocoa, Florida.
Currently, SpaceX is developing twin Starship prototypes at launch and landing test facilities in Boca Chica, Texas (“Mk1”) and in Cocoa, FL (“Mk2”). Musk recently visited the facilities and announced that he is planning to present a technical Starship development update as early as September 28th.
According to an interview posted on WWDJapan.com as part of a September 12th Zozo press conference, Maezawa explained that he believes he made some missteps while serving as Zozo CEO, negatively affecting the company’s bottom line. He believes that more team-oriented business practices and a change of leadership could help to improve the company, which is currently holding its head well above water but still likely to far fall behind its FY2019 performance goals. It’s also hoped that selling an ownership stake in the company will give Yahoo Japan the flexibility to grow Zozo and improve its global reach.
The role of Zozo CEO now goes to Kotaro Sawada who accompanied Maezawa on stage at the announcement event along with Yahoo Japan’s president, Kentaro Kawamata. According to Forbes.com Maezawa stated that “Sawada is the exact opposite of my instinct-based management and adept at management based on logic, like crunching data and testing things out first.”
While Yahoo Japan will look to expand Zozo and the associated online shopping mall Zozotown to compete with other online retailers such as Amazon and Rakuten, Maezawa says that he will turn his attention to achieving his personal goal of a trip around the moon. He mentioned that he plans to fly to space prior to his circumlunar flight in 2023 and will spend much of his time training and learning foreign languages for spaceflight.
He also plans to pursue building another company from the ground up. Whether his next company will be an endeavor focused around space tourism remains to be seen.
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Elon Musk
Tesla confirms that work on Dojo 3 has officially resumed
“Now that the AI5 chip design is in good shape, Tesla will restart work on Dojo 3,” Elon Musk wrote in a post on X.
Tesla has restarted work on its Dojo 3 initiative, its in-house AI training supercomputer, now that its AI5 chip design has reached a stable stage.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed the update in a recent post on X.
Tesla’s Dojo 3 initiative restarted
In a post on X, Musk said that with the AI5 chip design now “in good shape,” Tesla will resume work on Dojo 3. He added that Tesla is hiring engineers interested in working on what he expects will become the highest-volume AI chips in the world.
“Now that the AI5 chip design is in good shape, Tesla will restart work on Dojo3. If you’re interested in working on what will be the highest volume chips in the world, send a note to AI_Chips@Tesla.com with 3 bullet points on the toughest technical problems you’ve solved,” Musk wrote in his post on X.
Musk’s comment followed a series of recent posts outlining Tesla’s broader AI chip roadmap. In another update, he stated that Tesla’s AI4 chip alone would achieve self-driving safety levels well above human drivers, AI5 would make vehicles “almost perfect” while significantly enhancing Optimus, and AI6 would be focused on Optimus and data center applications.
Musk then highlighted that AI7/Dojo 3 will be designed to support space-based AI compute.
Tesla’s AI roadmap
Musk’s latest comments helped resolve some confusion that emerged last year about Project Dojo’s future. At the time, Musk stated on X that Tesla was stepping back from Dojo because it did not make sense to split resources across multiple AI chip architectures.
He suggested that clustering large numbers of Tesla AI5 and AI6 chips for training could effectively serve the same purpose as a dedicated Dojo successor. “In a supercomputer cluster, it would make sense to put many AI5/AI6 chips on a board, whether for inference or training, simply to reduce network cabling complexity & cost by a few orders of magnitude,” Musk wrote at the time.
Musk later reinforced that idea by responding positively to an X post stating that Tesla’s AI6 chip would effectively be the new Dojo. Considering his recent updates on X, however, it appears that Tesla will be using AI7, not AI6, as its dedicated Dojo successor. The CEO did state that Tesla’s AI7, AI8, and AI9 chips will be developed in short, nine-month cycles, so Dojo’s deployment might actually be sooner than expected.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s xAI brings 1GW Colossus 2 AI training cluster online
Elon Musk shared his update in a recent post on social media platform X.
xAI has brought its Colossus 2 supercomputer online, making it the first gigawatt-scale AI training cluster in the world, and it’s about to get even bigger in a few months.
Elon Musk shared his update in a recent post on social media platform X.
Colossus 2 goes live
The Colossus 2 supercomputer, together with its predecessor, Colossus 1, are used by xAI to primarily train and refine the company’s Grok large language model. In a post on X, Musk stated that Colossus 2 is already operational, making it the first gigawatt training cluster in the world.
But what’s even more remarkable is that it would be upgraded to 1.5 GW of power in April. Even in its current iteration, however, the Colossus 2 supercomputer already exceeds the peak demand of San Francisco.
Commentary from users of the social media platform highlighted the speed of execution behind the project. Colossus 1 went from site preparation to full operation in 122 days, while Colossus 2 went live by crossing the 1-GW barrier and is targeting a total capacity of roughly 2 GW. This far exceeds the speed of xAI’s primary rivals.
Funding fuels rapid expansion
xAI’s Colossus 2 launch follows xAI’s recently closed, upsized $20 billion Series E funding round, which exceeded its initial $15 billion target. The company said the capital will be used to accelerate infrastructure scaling and AI product development.
The round attracted a broad group of investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital Group. Strategic partners NVIDIA and Cisco also continued their support, helping xAI build what it describes as the world’s largest GPU clusters.
xAI said the funding will accelerate its infrastructure buildout, enable rapid deployment of AI products to billions of users, and support research tied to its mission of understanding the universe. The company noted that its Colossus 1 and 2 systems now represent more than one million H100 GPU equivalents, alongside recent releases including the Grok 4 series, Grok Voice, and Grok Imagine. Training is also already underway for its next flagship model, Grok 5.
Elon Musk
Tesla AI5 chip nears completion, Elon Musk teases 9-month development cadence
The Tesla CEO shared his recent insights in a post on social media platform X.
Tesla’s next-generation AI5 chip is nearly complete, and work on its successor is already underway, as per a recent update from Elon Musk.
The Tesla CEO shared his recent insights in a post on social media platform X.
Musk details AI chip roadmap
In his post, Elon Musk stated that Tesla’s AI5 chip design is “almost done,” while AI6 has already entered early development. Musk added that Tesla plans to continue iterating rapidly, with AI7, AI8, AI9, and future generations targeting a nine-month design cycle.
He also noted that Tesla’s in-house chips could become the highest-volume AI processors in the world. Musk framed his update as a recruiting message, encouraging engineers to join Tesla’s AI and chip development teams.
Tesla community member Herbert Ong highlighted the strategic importance of the timeline, noting that faster chip cycles enable quicker learning, faster iteration, and a compounding advantage in AI and autonomy that becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to close.
AI5 manufacturing takes shape
Musk’s comments align with earlier reporting on AI5’s production plans. In December, it was reported that Samsung is preparing to manufacture Tesla’s AI5 chip, accelerating hiring for experienced engineers to support U.S. production and address complex foundry challenges.
Samsung is one of two suppliers selected for AI5, alongside TSMC. The companies are expected to produce different versions of the AI5 chip, with TSMC reportedly using a 3nm process and Samsung using a 2nm process.
Musk has previously stated that while different foundries translate chip designs into physical silicon in different ways, the goal is for both versions of the Tesla AI5 chip to operate identically. AI5 will succeed Tesla’s current AI4 hardware, formerly known as Hardware 4, and is expected to support the company’s Full Self-Driving system as well as other AI-driven efforts, including Optimus.
Tesla confirms that work on Dojo 3 has officially resumed
Elon Musk’s xAI brings 1GW Colossus 2 AI training cluster online
