Hello. Welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US technology editor at the Guardian. I am writing to you while listening to George Handel’s Easter Messiah.
We are about to embark on an unprecedented, in-depth investigation into one of the world’s largest and strangest business empires.
SpaceX secretly filed for an initial public offering on the U.S. stock market last week at an astronomical valuation. My colleague Nick Robbins Early reports:
Elon Musk’s company has become a dominant force in both space travel and satellite communications, and could seek a valuation of more than $1.75 trillion. The confidential filing will give regulators a period of time to review and discuss the company’s financial information before it is made available to investors and the public.
Bloomberg reports that the IPO could take place as early as June, in what is expected to be a banner year for big-ticket public offerings. Musk’s rival OpenAI also plans to go public at a hefty valuation later this year, with fellow AI company Anthropic preparing its own IPO and announcing on Tuesday that it had closed a $122 billion funding round. SpaceX is the parent company of Musk’s own artificial intelligence company xAI.
By filing for an IPO, Musk has a second path to becoming the world’s first millionaire. According to Forbes magazine, his estimated 43% stake in SpaceX is his largest asset. His troubled car company, Tesla, agreed to pay him $1 trillion last year, saying it was transitioning from cars to a robot company that would automate all labor. Tesla shareholders voted in November to approve a compensation package that could reach $1 trillion if Musk leads the company to great success over the next 10 years.
SpaceX is a strange collective. That’s the aerospace company SpaceX, the US space agency’s largest contractor for interstellar launches and the manufacturer of some of the most advanced rockets on Earth. Starlink, the satellite internet company, also owns and operates a little more than half of all the satellites orbiting the Earth and sells internet services that are essential to airliners, rural areas and war. And xAI, the artificial intelligence company that created the Grok chatbot, is most famous for disrobing real women and girls in thousands of images, leading neo-Nazis to declare themselves “mecha-Hitler” and winning a $200 million contract with the U.S. military. Meanwhile, xAI owns X (formerly Twitter), one of the world’s most famous but least profitable social networks, known for its brevity, political influence, harassment, hate speech, and heated discourse.
If you were to describe SpaceX to an alien who crashed into a satellite, you could say that SpaceX is an online advertising company that launches rockets and might one day build a data center in space. You could say it’s an AI company with an arsenal of spaceships led by the world’s richest man, or a satellite company with a psychopathic chatbot helmed by a founder who fired hundreds of thousands of U.S. government employees in six months. It could be said that the President of the United States used SpaceX’s website to incite riots and announce that he had contracted the coronavirus. For investors and bankers who have valued SpaceX at $1.75 trillion, this messy situation somehow makes sense.
SpaceX is required to submit documents in the coming months detailing how all of these pieces fit together, with the goal of convincing regulators and investors alike that no Jenga blocks are missing. This filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, known as an S-1, includes a prospectus, audited financial statements, and projections of business risks.
In an S-1 filing, a company details its business model and strategy. SpaceX will need to detail its vast array of businesses and explain how they work together. The rationale for its recent acquisition of xAI may provide a clue. Via Nick: SpaceX acquired Musk’s xAI in February, citing plans to build solar-powered data centers in space that could help meet the computing and energy needs of the AI boom.
Companies must also turn over their balance sheets to accountants to complete audited financial statements. We’ll soon find out just how much money SpaceX makes and what its strange business pillars are. The two biggest are a launch contract with NASA and a subscription to Starlink’s internet services, which are themselves likely driven by the rocket business.
Space is a promising but untested frontier for the global (and perhaps soon interstellar) deployment of data centers. Although these are theoretically possible and are being actively developed, business opportunities are not guaranteed.
Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary this week
Opinions about AI
Backlash shows how readers don’t want AI
At the other end of the spectrum to Silicon Valley’s use of AI are artistic professions, where accusations of using AI as a shortcut can ruin careers. Audiences expect authenticity, originality, and accuracy. AI tools that produce these three qualities are very difficult to replicate.
Readers of novels and newspapers believe that using the language of chatbots is breaking the bond of trust. Both authors have faced significant backlash in recent weeks for their use of AI. One failed at a book deal, the other failed at a job.
Publisher Hachette has canceled the release of the horror novel Shy Girl after speculation about the use of AI was confirmed in an internal review.
“Shy Girl” by Mia Ballard was scheduled to be released in the U.S. this spring by Hachette’s Orbit. However, after an internal review, the publisher confirmed that publication had been discontinued. The decision comes after weeks of online speculation about the novel’s origins, during which readers on platforms such as Goodreads and Reddit questioned whether some of the text bore the hallmarks of AI-generated prose.
Ballard denied that he personally used AI to write the novel. In comments to the New York Times, she said that an acquaintance she hired to help develop an earlier self-published version had incorporated AI tools.
“This controversy has changed my life in so many ways, my mental health is at an all-time low, and my name has been ruined for something I didn’t even personally do,” she wrote in an email. New York Times.
Read more: Hachette withdraws horror novel ‘Shy Girl’ following allegations of AI use
A European journalist failed to fact-check a quote a chatbot retrieved on his behalf, a mistake he publicly advised others not to make.
The publisher of Dutch newspapers De Telegraaf and the Irish Independent has suspended one of its senior journalists after he admitted using AI to “put words in people’s mouths incorrectly”.
The experienced journalist said he used AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s NotebookLM to summarize his reports, but did not verify whether the quotes from those summaries were accurate. He then published them in the Substack newsletter.
This error was uncovered by an NRC investigation into one of Mediahuis’ own titles. [Peter] Vandermersch served as editor-in-chief in the 2010s. The NRC claimed that Mr. Vandermersch published “dozens” of false quotes and said that seven people quoted in his posts did not make the statements attributed to them.
Read more: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated citation
