A social media site, an ISP, the lives of astronauts, and the health of the economy may soon depend on one absurd company.
SpaceX is acquiring xAI. Ever since this merger of two Musk companies became a rumor, crazy numbers like $1.5 trillion started being thrown around when discussing the total valuation of SpaceX, so you might sum it up by saying “Combining SpaceX and xAI gets you the biggest IPO of all time!” and yeah, that’s more plausible now than ever. For reference, SpaceX’s valuation was estimated at around $800 billion less than two months ago.
But is this merger as silly as it sounds?
The combined company will be a “vertically-integrated innovation engine,” according to a new SpaceX press release with Elon Musk’s personal signature on it. By his own reckoning, the company now deals in “AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform.” Another way of saying this might be that SpaceX is now the company behind vertically-landing rocket boosters, the majority of the satellites currently in orbit, very fat rockets that tend to explode, an ISP, the microblogging app known as X, a sassy chatbot called Grok that’s famous for lewd images, and much much more.
SpaceX will now own, for instance, Grokipedia, the AI-written, anti-woke parody of Wikipedia. And remember Vine, the defunct 6-second video social media app? Yes SpaceX, which possesses billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts and is responsible for crewed NASA missions, now owns the rights to Vine too. Musk claims he’s bringing it back “in AI form.”
As many have pointed out before me, SpaceX became a genuinely indispensable player in humanity’s aerospace and space travel efforts through an iterative process involving an extraordinary number of spectacular and public rocket explosions that almost certainly would not have been tolerated if SpaceX were a government agency.
