Bryce Elder, on the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog:

Here’s paragraph one of the Morgan Stanley’s SpaceX initiation note:

With an ‘X of 1’ position in space infrastructure, we believe SpaceX can convert energy into intelligence at scale with optionality to monetize through a range of consumer and enterprise solutions for the next era of AI… the final frontier.

[Adam] Jonas — formerly the Wall Street bank’s Tesla and occasionally other auto companies analyst — was last year reallocated to the sort of free-radical futurologist role we’d thought had been cornered by Shingy.

Today’s news that SpaceX has already started dipping below its IPO valuation reminded me of this piece. Remind me — is being compared to Shingy good?

At any rate, Morgan Stanley estimates that the combination of X and Grok will grow this year to generate only a little less revenue than Twitter did in 2021, its last full fiscal year as a public company. Fear not, investors, as the bank also says SpaceX will make $17 billion in “enterprise A.I.”, and then nearly triple that next year. I guess everyone wants to give money to the CSAM and misogynist fantasy generator for business.

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The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada:

An investigation by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has found that Grok’s AI image-generation tool was launched without proper safeguards or sufficient consideration of potential privacy harms.

This lack of protections allowed users around the globe to create and share non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes, many targeting women and children.

In a report released today, Commissioner Philippe Dufresne found that X Corp. and xAI violated Canada’s federal private-sector privacy law.

According to the full report, while a privacy impact assessment was completed of the previous version of Grok’s image generation model, one was not done for Grok Imagine until March, well after its July 2025 launch. Even then, the assessment “did not accurately reflect […] risks to security, safety and privacy”.

Grok is now owned by SpaceX, which is going public tomorrow in extraordinary fashion. It is still generating abusive imagery.

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The Agence France-Presse reporting on the U.S. president’s social-media-and-cryptocurrency-and-maybe-nuclear-fusion operation:

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) reported revenue of less than US$1 million for the three months ending March 31, according to a company filing.

Under $4 million in annual revenue is less than how much Twitter was earning in 2009 — unadjusted for inflation — an amount Steven Levy described as “modest”.

Speaking of Twitter, let us check in on SpaceX which, after a series of totally normal business deals, now owns the company and is preparing to trade publicly. Mike Masnick, of Techdirt:

Remember, the plan was $26.4 billion [in Twitter/X revenue] by 2028. We’re more than halfway there. How’s it going? Well… when he combines xAI (grok) revenue with X revenue (so not even just breaking out X’s ad revenue)… we get… a total of $3.201 billion in 2025. So, just to put this in perspective… when he took over in 2022 he laid out a five year plan to take the company that had $4.5 billion in ad revenue the year before he bought it up to $12 billion in five years. Three years in and… it’s now somewhere pretty far below $3 billion. […]

Earlier this year, a judge found against Elon Musk in a lawsuit filed by X against advertisers claiming they staged an illegal boycott.

The SpaceX prospectus, by the way, is one of the funniest documents to ever live on the sec.gov domain. It is lucky the business it is known for is so damn photogenic because it is, at present, a profitable satellite internet provider with side businesses of space exploration and artificial intelligence that each lose money. (How it internally accounts for the cost of sending Starlink satellites into orbit is a fantastic question.) And the present business model of the latter is something Patrick Boyle described as “renting GPUs to a competitor on terms that can vanish in a fiscal quarter”. Yet the company still claims the size of its total addressable market is over $28 trillion, or over one-fifth of the entire world’s GDP.

Even so, a $1.75–2 trillion valuation is plausible simply because of Musk. Similarly, and back to that AFP article:

According to its filing, TMTG generated US$900,000 in revenue during the first quarter, a paltry amount for a company valued at US$2.47 billion on the stock market.

That valuation is not much; at time of writing, it is worth about as much as Central Garden & Pet, owners of Nylabone and McKenzie plant seeds. That company last quarter posted revenues one thousand times greater than TMTG, with profit margins of over 12%. Nevertheless, TMTG has a connection to the U.S. president, so it is similarly valued. Lots of good, normal stuff happening in the world’s largest and most powerful economy.

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