Three years ago Elon Musk wrote "Master Plan Part 3," where the vision was simple - full transition to a solar electric economy. Today his companies are doing something very different. xAI - his AI company - is powering its data centers with 46 unregulated natural-gas turbines, and plans to buy more for $2.8 billion (around 2.6 billion euros) in new fossil-fuel infrastructure.

That doesn't mean Musk has fully abandoned the solar idea - he seems to have simply moved it into space. According to SpaceX's latest filing, orbital solar arrays could generate "more than five times the energy" compared to those on Earth. The argument? AI companies will allegedly demand "terawatt-scale annual growth in compute capacity," and for that there's not enough space and energy on Earth.

The numbers still convince. SpaceX bought Cybertruck vehicles for $131 million (1,279 units). xAI invested $697 million in Tesla's Megapack battery systems over two years. As for solar on Earth? Almost nothing. Tesla, which still officially sells solar panels, is suddenly not the priority for Musk's biggest fan - Musk himself.

There's also one main question. Global data centers today consume around 40 gigawatts. The entire human civilization continuously uses around 4 terawatts. Musk is projecting a jump of hundreds of times more, which is an extrapolation many engineers consider marketing, not real demand. Launching solar panels into orbit requires more energy than trucking them out to a desert, and scaling space-ready products has never been achieved.

The paradox is obvious and visible. Musk, who built a reputation as the leader of the energy transition, is at this moment dressing xAI up in gas turbines and claiming this is a "temporary pause" until the moment space solves the problem. Temporary measures in industrial infrastructure have a tendency to last two decades. And Tesla, which once represented part of the vision for Earth-bound solar, looks more and more like an assistant in building something else.