Musk abandoned his own 'solar electric economy' to burn gas for an AI chatbot no one uses | Electrek

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Musk abandoned his own ‘solar electric economy’ to burn gas for an AI chatbot no one uses

Fred Lambert | May 25 2026 - 7:54 am PT

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Elon Musk spent years telling the world that solar power was the obvious answer to Earth’s energy needs — that a small patch of desert could power the entire United States. Now, he’s burning millions of tons of fossil fuels to run an AI chatbot that has lost 60% of its downloads, selling the unused compute to a company he called “misanthropic and evil” three months ago, and pitching space-based solar panels right as SpaceX files for a $2 trillion IPO.

The contradictions are stacking up faster than xAI’s unpermitted gas turbines.

‘A small corner of Nevada’: Musk’s solar vision

In July 2017, Musk stood before the National Governors Association and made the case for solar with the kind of clarity that made him an icon of the clean energy movement. “If you wanted to power the entire US with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States,” he said.

He added that the battery storage needed for 24/7 power was “1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile. That’s it.” He called the sun “a giant fusion reactor in the sky” that is “really reliable.”<br>Advertisement - scroll for more content

This was not a one-off comment. It was the foundation of his entire business thesis. Tesla’s original 2006 Master Plan stated that the company’s “overarching purpose” was “to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy.” That was the stated reason Tesla existed. He made Tesla acquire SolarCity in 2016 for $2.6 billion to prove it. And as recently as 2023, Tesla’s Master Plan Part 3 laid out a detailed path to “eliminate fossil fuels.”

He repeated the desert solar pitch again in 2019 on X, writing: “Which means a small corner of Texas (or anywhere) with solar panels could power the entire United States.”

The math checked out. Multiple independent analyses confirmed it. And crucially, the point was that solar on Earth was so abundant, so simple, and so cheap that the energy transition was just an execution problem, not a technology problem.

From ‘solar electric economy’ to 62 gas turbines

Fast forward to 2026, and Musk’s xAI, now folded into SpaceX, is operating 62 unpermitted methane gas turbines across two data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, and Southaven, Mississippi. The turbines power xAI’s Colossus supercomputers, which trains and runs Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, or at least used to.

According to xAI’s own permit applications, the combined facilities could emit more than 6 million tons of greenhouse gases per year, along with over 1,300 tons of health-harming air pollutants. The EPA closed the regulatory loophole xAI was exploiting in January 2026, but thermal drone footage from February showed the turbines still running. The NAACP and Earthjustice have asked courts for emergency action to stop the illegal pollution. And xAI wasn’t slowing down — it was buying $2.8 billion more gas turbines.

As we noted in March, xAI is actively undoing Tesla’s climate work, all to power AI slop. The man who built a brand around making fossil fuels obsolete is now one of America’s most aggressive new consumers of natural gas.

And here’s the kicker: while xAI has spent $697 million on Tesla Megapacks for its data centers, it hasn’t bought a materially significant amount of solar panels from Tesla, according to the SpaceX S-1 filing. SpaceX spent $131 million on 1,279 Cybertrucks. But solar panels for the data center burning gas? Apparently not a priority.

The chatbot nobody uses

All of this might be easier to stomach if Grok were actually a market-leading product. It’s not.

Grok entered 2026 as the second most-popular AI chatbot globally — thanks to inflated numbers through X auto-replies. By April, it had plummeted to fifth place, behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek. Monthly active users dropped 12.5% in a single month to 12.2 million, while Claude surged 44% to 23 million users. Downloads crashed 60%.

In the enterprise market, only 7% of companies reported using Grok in March 2026, compared to 48% for Claude and 40% for Gemini. A survey of 260,000 Americans found that just 0.174% paid for Grok in Q2 2026.

So Musk is burning 6 million tons of greenhouse gases per year to power a chatbot that fewer and fewer people actually use. The 2017 version of Elon Musk would have had a field day with that math.

‘Misanthropic and evil’ — until there’s money on the table

With Grok unable to fill the Colossus data center’s 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, Musk did what any principled AI safety advocate would do: he...