Elon Musks' Twitter/X, Tesla and Space X

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Musk's bet on space-based AI

Elon Musk and his SpaceX team believe they've cracked the code on building orbiting data centers to power the future of AI — and plan to use the company's upcoming public offering to help fund the audacious vision, people briefed on the plans tell Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen for a "Behind the Curtain" column.

• Why it matters: Musk and top executives at other AI giants believe that earthbound data centers will become politically toxic and less efficient than space, which they see as the inevitable answer.

The intrigue: Sources tell us OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agrees with Musk on the physics, but knows the two men are unlikely to work together while they're battling in court.

• Altman has explored a deal with Stoke Space, a Seattle-area startup building fully reusable rockets, as a potential acquisition to build his own orbital fleet.

Altman "lights up" when he discusses space, and is prepared to spend billions to stake an off-planet claim, sources tell us.

• A Silicon Valley investor told us that space is such an essential frontier in the AI race that OpenAI has to "do something relatively quickly. Otherwise, they run a real risk of being left behind. Sam's not going to allow that to happen. ... He's thinking very long-term."

?️ The scorecard: Google owns roughly 7% of SpaceX — an investment worth around $100 billion at the company's rumored $1.5 trillion valuation. So Google wins big if Musk is right, even as it pursues its own rival moonshot called Project Suncatcher.

• The money at stake here is hard to comprehend. The biggest data center companies are already expected to spend more than $500 billion just this year on expansion. Now add the cost of satellites and launches.

Here's how it works: Musk plans to use SpaceX's Starship — the most powerful launch vehicle ever built — to create a huge satellite constellation, much like today's Starlink constellation, as the data centers of the future.

• Today's rockets can't lift the heavy cooling systems that AI chips require. Starship can. It will carry massive next-generation Starlink satellites that function less like internet routers and more like supercomputers in the sky.

By positioning these satellites in a high orbit that stays in constant sunlight, they can harvest solar power around the clock. No night. No clouds. No electric bills.

• And instead of sending data through fiber-optic cables under the ocean, information travels between satellites via laser beams through the vacuum of space — faster and without the infrastructure.

? Reality check: Cooling computers in space is brutally hard. On Earth, air carries heat away from processors. In the vacuum of space, there's no air—so chips overheat and die.

• Musk claims SpaceX has designed massive, foldable radiators that unfurl in orbit to vent heat into the cold of deep space. Skeptics call it the biggest engineering hurdle since the reusable rocket.

Between the lines: This isn't just about AI. It's about energy.

• Earth's power grids are maxed out. Data centers are already competing for electricity with factories and homes. Musk is betting the only way to scale AI without crashing the grid is to move the computing off the planet entirely.

? Friction point: On Earth, upgrading a data center is easy — just replace some hardware. Skeptical technology watchers will gladly tell you the obvious: It's not so simple in space.

• Massive robotics innovations will be necessary to maintain a fleet of space data centers, unless companies want to launch all-new satellites and somehow dispose of the old ones every time there's a hardware failure or an upgrade cycle.

The bottom line: If Musk pulls this off, SpaceX won't just own transportation to space. It'll gain a huge edge on the computing power of the future.

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🚀 Musk eyes SpaceX merger with xAI (or Tesla!)

Elon Musk's SpaceX and xAI are in discussions to merge ahead of a blockbuster IPO planned for later this year, Reuters reports.

• As an alternate combo, SpaceX is also reported to be considering a potential merger with Tesla.

🛰️ A SpaceX-xAI tie-up would bring Musk's rockets, Starlink satellites, the X social media platform and Grok AI chatbot under one roof.

• 🤖 It would also give fresh momentum to SpaceX's effort to launch data centers into orbit as Musk battles for AI supremacy.

💡 Flashback: Jim and Mike wrote last week that Musk and his SpaceX team believe they've cracked the code on building orbiting data centers — and plan to use the initial public offering to fund the audacious vision. (Read the column.)

🎂 Musk has proposed timing SpaceX's initial public offering, with a valuation of $1.5 trillion, "to coincide with a rare planetary alignment and his birthday" (June 28), the Financial Times says.

• Go deeper: How Musk's flying data centers would work.

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🤖 Elon's biggest bet

With SpaceX's acquisition of xAI, Elon Musk is making one of the most audacious moves in tech history, Axios Pro Rata author Dan Primack writes.

• Why it matters: Musk — by uniting his space and AI companies — is betting his empire on orbital data centers powered by the sun.

Don't be surprised if this is a prelude to a merger with Tesla, which recently invested $2 billion in xAI:

• Tesla would make the chips.
• SpaceX would be responsible for launches and satellites.
• xAI would build the models and agentic networks.

Screenshot: @elonmusk/X

The big picture: If this works, it could threaten OpenAI — the only AI giant it's impossible to see Musk partnering with or selling services to.

• The combined SpaceX-xAI company is valued at around $1.2 trillion.

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Elon Musk’s Social Media Site Tanks as X Goes Down for Thousands

Reports of bugs started flowing in before 9 a.m. ET on Monday.

The week has got off to a flyer for Elon Musk as his social media site, X, has gone down for thousands of users. Issues were reported worldwide, according to Down Detector, a site that tracks social media outages. Just before 9 a.m. Eastern Time on Monday, more than 40,000 users had reported issues in the U.S. Posting, loading other users’ posts, and generally navigating the site were a problem when Daily Beast reporters ran a test. “Something went wrong. Try reloading,” was the error message. There were also more than 11,000 reports in the U.K. at the time of writing. Users in Canada, Australia, France and Germany, among other countries, have also been impacted. “User reports indicate problems with X (Twitter) since 8:42 AM EST. How is it affecting you? #XTwitterDown,” Down Detector wrote, quite ironically, on X. It is unclear what is causing the blackout. A similar outage affected tens of thousands of users last month.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-social-media-site-tanks-as-x-goes-down-for-thousands/?

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Musk Makes Humiliating Confession About Hitler-Praising Chatbot

The company behind the near-trillionaire’s AI chatbot has seen a mass exodus of top staff.

The world’s richest man has once again proved that money can’t buy everything.

Elon Musk has admitted in a humiliating low that the company he founded to rival OpenAI and other artificial intelligence firms has failed so catastrophically that it needs to be completely restarted.

“xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” Musk said in response to a post on X about a new hire at the company.

He claimed that the “same thing happened with Tesla,” the electric vehicle company he took over from its founders.

Musk launched the AI firm with 11 other people in July of 2023 in a challenge to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Since then, all but two of the original team members—Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen—have departed the company.

Musk’s high-profile tech researchers and engineers were drawn from companies like Google, DeepMind, and Microsoft, but left in a steady trickle, complaining of burnout, failing safety regulations, and a physically unhealthy work environment.

In a separate post, the near-trillionaire said he was personally leafing through rejected applications to xAI with his hiring manager.

He suggested that the application process was inadequate from the start and that he would be attempting to win back those who were rejected.

“Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI. My apologies,” Musk wrote.

“@BarisAkis and I are going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates.”

xAI has an extremely ambitious aim of creating artificial general intelligence—considered the holy grail of AI technology—by the end of this year, and the company pays some of the highest salaries in the industry.

However, Musk’s self-described “extremely hardcore” workplace requirements, including shifts of up to 19 hours, are reportedly driving employees away.

The company’s most public-facing project, Grok, is mainly used on X by people clarifying the veracity of information with the now-ubiquitous and banal phrase “Grok, is this true?”

The chatbot Musk integrated with the social media platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022 has, however, been plagued with a string of high-profile controversies.

In July of last year, Musk—reportedly frustrated with his creation’s endless fact-checking in right-wing echo chambers—overhauled Grok to remove its “woke” leanings.

As a result, the chatbot began spewing vile antisemitic conspiracy theories, praising Nazis, and describing itself as “MechaHitler.” xAI was forced to issue a rare public apology.

In January of this year, following another attempt to “un-woke” the AI, Grok’s image generation capabilities were upgraded, and users quickly began producing non-consensual sexual imagery of real people. Thousands of explicit images of celebrities, private individuals, and even children were created and shared across the platform.

Musk initially responded to the controversy with memes and jokes about the issue, but later restricted Grok’s explicit image-generation capabilities to paying users.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer took a very hardline stance on the issue and described Musk’s platform as “disgusting” and “monetizing abuse.”

“If X cannot control Grok, we will—and we’ll do it fast because if you profit from harm and abuse, you lose the right to self-regulate," Starmer said.

Musk is currently facing a multi-year probe into the issue by the European Commission, a territory in which he continues to boost far-right political parties.

In unverified responses to Musk’s apology about the xAI disaster, engineers who claimed to have applied to work at the company vented their frustrations at Musk, who continued to apologize.

“It’s that bad, eh?” technology YouTuber Zack Nelson—AKA JerryRigEverything—commented.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-makes-humiliating-confession-about-grok-his-hitler-praising-chatbot/?

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🚀 Musk unveils record chip-building plan

Elon Musk's announcement livestreams from Austin last night. Screenshot: Terafab Elon Musk took the stage in Austin last night for what he called a "profoundly important announcement … the most epic chip-building exercise in history, by far." His goal: producing 1 trillion watts (1 terawatt) of compute power per year, most of it deployed in space. Why it matters: Musk said his Terafab chip-building project — a joint effort of his Tesla, xAI and SpaceX companies — is "the next step towards becoming a galactic civilization" and turning "science fiction to science fact." Huge chip plant Musk plans for the Austin area. Screenshot: Terafab Rendering above: Musk said the project will kick off with an advanced technology fab (semiconductor manufacturing facility) in Austin — headquarters of Tesla and home of its Gigafactory. His Neuralink, Boring, and SpaceX companies also have growing Texas operations. Musk's ambition is to manufacture his own chips for AI, humanoid robots and space data centers. Speaking with dramatic lighting at a historic power plant in downtown Austin, Musk said his "existing supply chain" is "much less than we would like. And so we either build the Terafab, or we don't have the chips." Musk "showed an animation of how SpaceX could potentially launch satellites from the surface of the moon," Bloomberg notes, "and reiterated his vision for a future filled with 'amazing abundance' — something he has been touting in recent months." For instance, he said anyone who wants to will be able to fly to Saturn. Watch the announcement.

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Musk's monster IPO

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios

SpaceX is preparing to launch the largest IPO of all time — with expectations that it could raise more than all U.S. listings in 2024 and 2025 combined, Axios Pro Rata author Dan Primack writes. Why it matters: Wall Street is understandably giddy. But what it's about to pitch investors is unprecedented, and could impact how (or if) other AI giants go public later this year. Here are four ways this IPO is different from all others: 📈 1. Size: SpaceX reportedly wants to raise around $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation. For context, the entire U.S. IPO market only raised more money in two of the past 10 years. It'll also seek to become the first company to ever go public at a valuation of $1 trillion or more, with hopes of immediately being worth more than Walmart, Exxon Mobil or Meta. Finally, Musk is said to be reserving up to 30% of the offering for individual investors — three times the norm. ❓ 2. Big unknowns: SpaceX has been around for decades, but the version going public is a newly formed conglomerate. Elon Musk recently merged xAI into SpaceX, after having previously merged X into xAI (whose 11 cofounders have all left). No one really knows if the combinations will work, and it's too early for there to be much evidence in either direction. Let alone if SpaceX's plan for 1 million orbital data centers — which seems to be Musk's grand vision — is viable. 🚀 3. X factor: Elon Musk himself. And not just the part about him seeking to simultaneously run two of the world's most valuable companies. Musk hasn't been part of an IPO since Tesla in 2010. At the time, he was fairly quiet on social media. In fact, his first-ever tweet was just a couple of weeks earlier. Today's Musk may struggle to comply with rules about what company insiders can and can't say once the IPO process begins. On the other hand, the current Securities & Exchange Commission is lax when it comes to enforcement, and Musk is (usually) friendly with the boss's boss. 💰 4. Red ink: We don't yet know SpaceX's overall financials, and its initial IPO filing is likely to be confidential. What we're fairly certain of, however, is that its xAI unit is hemorrhaging money — just like other large foundation models that are scaling by spending on GPUs. Investors may not care, believing all things AI are up and to the right. But this would be the first major market test.

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🚙 Tesla is developing a smaller, cheaper electric SUV, Reuters reports. The car would be about 14 feet long — significantly shorter than Tesla's top-selling Model Y SUV, which is about 15.7 feet long. Go deeper.

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What Elon Musk's $800 Billion Can't Buy

Elon Musk has $800 billion and 14 kids. He's still not happy. Harvard's 85-year study explains why.

https://aish.com/what-elon-musks-800-billion-cant-buy/?

ps:It doesn't take 85 years to know why he's not happy, he just needs to read the Bible!!

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🤖 How Elon grew to love Anthropic

Photo Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios. Photos: Getty Images

Elon Musk's surprise deal with Anthropic, announced yesterday, lets him accomplish two things at once: turn unused compute into revenue before an expected SpaceX IPO next month — and stick it to his archrival, Sam Altman. Why it matters: Musk went from calling Anthropic "evil" to doing business with it in three months, showing how quickly competition can give way to strategic necessity in the AI race, Axios' Madison Mills and Ina Fried write. The big picture: The deal helps Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei address one of its most pressing problems — a severe compute deficit. Enter SpaceX, which will provide the AI lab with the entire capacity of its Colossus 1 data center, more than 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs) within the month. The intrigue: The deal comes as Musk is embroiled in a trial against OpenAI, the AI lab he co-founded that also happens to be Anthropic's biggest competitor. "Elon's enemy is Sam. Dario's enemy is Sam. Enemy of my enemy is a compute partner," Ben Pouladian, who does tech market research, wrote on X. Musk attacked Anthropic on X in February, calling some Claude output "misanthropic and evil." Now Musk says he "was impressed" after meeting with senior Anthropic leaders last week: "No one set off my evil detector." Keep reading.

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🌊 Elon's stock tsunami

Photo illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios. Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Elon Musk's trillion-dollar-plus SpaceX isn't a public company yet. But its size and ambitions are already upending the stock market and sparking questions over the power and influence wielded by such behemoths, Axios' Emily Peck writes. Why it matters: The SpaceX IPO, expected next month, would usher in a new AI era for public markets, potentially valuing the company at up to $2 trillion. 🖼️ The big picture: OpenAI and Anthropic are also expected to go public this year — possibly adding $5 trillion in value to the markets, estimates venture capitalist and MIT research fellow Paul Kedrosky. The IPOs will trigger an enormous wave of demand from investors who will pull money out of other assets to buy. The intrigue: The S&P 500 is considering changing its rules to fast-track SpaceX's inclusion in the benchmark index. That would guarantee lots of buyers for the stock: Index funds, which make up an increasingly large share of the market, would be effectively forced to invest. Nasdaq has already changed its rules to fast-track SpaceX onto the Nasdaq 100, which features the biggest tech companies. Critics say the changes are unfair and distort the market. The S&P proposal "is particularly egregious," Wall Street Journal markets columnist James Mackintosh writes under the headline, "Stock Indexes Are Contorting Themselves to Include SpaceX and OpenAI."

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🚀 SpaceX's IPO surprise

Photo illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios. Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

One of the most unexpected bits of AI news was just how big SpaceX is (or isn't). Axios' Dan Primack, who's been covering IPOs for more than 25 years, writes: Elon Musk's SpaceX isn't the financial juggernaut many were expecting, according to its IPO prospectus filed yesterday. Why it matters: It's expected to be the largest IPO ever and could make Musk the world's first trillionaire. But the prospectus shows just how much the IPO depends on expectations for future growth and investor servility to Musk — not the current underlying business. Those expectations will be tested if SpaceX really wants a $1.75 trillion valuation, which would make it one of the world's 10 most valuable companies. 🧮 By the numbers: SpaceX is wildly unprofitable, reporting a $4.9 billion net loss on $18.67 billion in consolidated revenue for 2025. For context, 200 companies in the S&P 500 had more revenue last year than SpaceX. This includes Tesla, where sales were five times higher. Keep reading ...

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SpaceX reveals plans for what could be the biggest-ever IPO Elon Musk announced plans Wednesday for one of the biggest sales of stock to the public ever for his company SpaceX, which is currently losing billions of dollars a year. Read more.

Why this matters: The prospectus did not put a dollar figure on the amount Musk hopes to raise, but various reports have put it at $75 billion or so. The stock sale could make Musk the world’s first trillionaire. Forbes currently puts his net worth at $839 billion. An $75 billion offering would easily surpass history’s largest IPO, from Saudi Aramco, the oil giant that went public seven years ago and raised $26 billion.   The prospectus reads in part like a Hollywood fantasy version of the future. One section details how part of Musk’s compensation will be granted only if he maintains “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.”

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The forever CEO

Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photo: Marc Piasecki/Getty Images SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will retain a vise-like grip on the company even after it goes public, Axios' Emily Peck and Matt Phillips report. Investors will have little control over how the company operates — and almost no ability to force Musk out. Many companies have embraced dual-class stock structures that give founder-CEOs more voting power. Yesterday's SpaceX filing blasts this strategy to a new level. 🗳️ How it works: Class A SpaceX shares give holders a single vote each. Class B shares, held by company insiders, confer 10 votes each. 👑 Musk — the majority Class B holder — has a stunning 85% of the voting rights. Class B holders get to decide the big questions. And when they sell their shares, the B's convert to A's — unless Musk is the buyer. The only person who can remove Musk as CEO or chair is Musk himself, as long as he holds most of the Class B shares. Go deeper.

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Elon's age of impunity

Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photos: Getty Images

Elon Musk is on the verge of financial immortality: The world's richest man — and potentially its first trillionaire — has built a sovereign corporate kingdom too systemic to fail, Axios' Zachary Basu writes. And yet, on the eve of SpaceX's monster IPO, its CEO was hunkered down in his digital fiefdom stoking far-right culture wars with an impunity unmatched in modern corporate history. Why it matters: Musk's years in the public eye, marked by serial controversy and an accelerating embrace of white identitarian politics, have inured investors to conduct that would be disqualifying for almost any other CEO. Nothing Musk says or does can dent Wall Street's appetite for a stake in his future-forging empire. Look no further than SpaceX's $1.75 trillion IPO, where demand for shares has already vastly outstripped the available supply ahead of tomorrow's historic market debut. 🔎 Zoom in: Anti-immigration riots erupted in Belfast on Tuesday night after graphic footage of a brutal street stabbing, allegedly by a Sudanese migrant, ricocheted across X. Masked mobs set fire to vehicles, a city bus, and several homes. Marauding through neighborhoods, they chanted "foreigners out" and forced minority families to flee under police protection. Musk, who posts near-daily about migrant violence, shared British far-right activist Tommy Robinson's list of locations to protest "another invader attack on our people." "Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!" Musk declared to his 240 million followers, drawing allegations of incitement from British leaders. Zoom out: Musk's anti-migrant activism extends across Western countries, where he suggests elites are intentionally engineering the demographic erasure of white populations — also known as the "Great Replacement" theory. In the U.S., Musk has fixated on noncitizen voter fraud, claiming Democrats are harvesting illegal immigrant votes to create a permanent, one-party state. That includes California, where he joined MAGA allies this week in alleging, without evidence, that Democrats committed massive fraud in the Los Angeles mayoral primary. 🌐 Musk's worldview relies on a singular, apocalyptic thesis: that Western civilization — which he frequently equates with white culture — is being systematically dismantled by mass migration, demographic change and "woke" institutions. He has clashed with world leaders like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has accused the tech billionaire of using his platform to "whip up division" and interfere in foreign democracies. Musk rejects characterizations of his rhetoric as racist or xenophobic, arguing those accusations have been weaponized to shut down debate on migration and crime. 🖼️ The big picture: As Musk's net worth rockets toward the 13-figure mark, he has achieved escape velocity from the traditional rules of corporate governance. A decade ago, a CEO amplifying such panic at home and overseas would have triggered a board crisis, investor revolt and days of corporate cleanup. Musk does it daily, in public, in real time, on the platform he owns. His companies have become critical infrastructure, and Trump-era politics have shifted the Overton window on the rhetoric of racial grievance.