08-03-2026SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSIVE

Google’s Moonshot Factory is just getting started

X, formerly Google X and the most ambitious innovation lab of our time, isn’t content just to watch its hits like Waymo and Wing take off. An exclusive look inside how Astro Teller and company are reinventing themselves—and what might be their next big thing.

[Photos: Courtesy of X]

A couple of miles from Google headquarters, a rehabbed midcentury shopping mall is home to a company that might be even Googlier than Google. Known as Google X until 2015, when it became a self-contained arm of the new holding company called Alphabet, it’s now just X. For clarity’s sake, it’s fond of calling itself “X, the Moonshot Factory”—definitely not to be confused with X, the Elon Musk-owned social network.

The moonshots in question are the often outrageous-sounding, potentially world-changing ideas the 16-year-old organization was created to incubate. They are the subject of the museum-like hall you walk through to enter its secretive workplace. Called the X Plex, this gallery of artifacts celebrates the factory’s triumphs (Waymo, Google Brain) and flops (Google Glass) in equal measure, along with intriguing lesser-known efforts such as Skip, a pair of “robotic pants.”

X’s foundational belief in taking huge swings and cherishing failure as a necessary ingredient of risk-taking reflects its Google origins. So does its cultivation of whimsical workplace idiosyncrasy. Most companies would look askance at employees skating indoors. X, by contrast, provides a supply of rollerblades right inside its entrance for staffers to use. It’s a nod to the preferred in-office transportation mode of its longtime leader, Astro Teller—who, in another willfully quirky touch, is X’s Captain of Moonshots, not its CEO.

But when Teller rolled up to the cafeteria table where we had lunch on a recent Tuesday, he wasn’t there to dwell on the case for X’s contrarian, hyper-ambitious approach to catalyzing new solutions to old problems. Instead, he spent more time talking about the ways the company has been fine-tuning its technique to give every promising moonshot its best chance at becoming a viable business—a goal that is often less about dreaming big than being ruthlessly objective.

An abrupt pivot this is not. Compared to X’s approach as originally conceived, “The philosophy is nearly identical,” he stresses. “We have learned a ton about how to implement that philosophy over time.”

That could make all the difference to X’s eventual legacy. When it comes to corporate America’s great innovation labs, “I’d say that the Mount Rushmore is Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and X,” says venture capitalist Gideon Yu, whose past gigs include tenures as the CFO of both YouTube and Facebook. Yet Bell Labs and PARC are remembered not only for their breakthroughs but also their parent companies’ failure to capitalize on them. Even X is still in the process of proving that it has a reliable, repeatable system for turning wild ideas into wildly successful businesses.

Yu is playing a part in that effort. The founder of Series X Capital, an independent investment firm, he has $500 million to spend, an office on X’s premises, and first dibs on its moonshots. As he explains it: “In a very Google way, the fine folks at X thought to themselves, ‘How can we be intellectually honest and figure out the way for our best innovations, our best technologies, our best projects to reach their maximum value potential?” Series X has invested in X graduates Anori, Chorus, Taara, and Verily Health, all of which are now standalone companies rather than Alphabet subsidiaries.

Companies born at X taking on outside funding is not new. Waymo, for instance, raised its first external round in 2020 and has received investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, and Silver Lake, among others. But Alphabet is now more open to reducing its stake below 50% in X graduates that aren’t core to its business, as it has with the ones Series X has invested in. That’s an acknowledgement that the company, for all its resources and eagerness to place big bets, can boil only so many oceans on its own.

“Would they like it if we gave them another one or two Google Brains or Waymos or Wings every decade?” asks Teller. “Of course. But do they want two a year? No, they don’t.”

After all these years, X’s overarching goal is still to make a science out of understanding which moonshots are most likely to reach their intended destination, then doing everything possible to get them there. “We believe that this is a numbers game,” says Teller. “And we have, I hope, a really efficient process at this point for discovering what the winners are and spending close to half of our money on them.”

A recently installed lending library near the X cafeteria offers a variety of books on 30-day loans for employees to draw inspiration from. That one of them is Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is fitting: Teller himself has compared the company to Willy Wonka’s mysterious confectionery. But another is Good to Great, Jim Collins’ no-nonsense guide to operational excellence. It’s tough to imagine two classic volumes with less in common, unless you consider the Dahl book’s topic to be business management.........

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