(Apu Gomes/Getty Images)

SpaceX merges with xAI, reportedly will seek an IPO valuation of $1.25 trillion

Elon Musk says his space company has merged with his AI company, with the lofty goal of eventually putting data centers in space.

Nate Becker

2/2/26 4:15PM

Elon Musk’s giant space company has merged with his AI company, according to a letter from Musk posted on the SpaceX website.

As part of the reasoning for the deal, Musk cited a pet idea among tech billionaires: powering AI by placing data centers in space.

“Current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial data centers, which require immense amounts of power and cooling. Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment.

In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale...

By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute.”

(This concept, by the way, would be exceptionally hard to pull off.)

After the tie-up, the combined company is aiming to go public at a valuation of about $1.25 trillion, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the merger was happening, citing an internal memo.

Tesla, which Bloomberg had previously reported to have been in consideration to be merged among the companies in some way, wasn’t mentioned in the report of the deal. Shares were roughly flat after-hours.

The move would tie together two of Musk’s signature companies — two of the biggest privately held firms in the world. It would also bundle together rockets, satellites, the social media site X, and artificial intelligence all under one company.

An IPO at a valuation of $1.25 trillion would immediately place the combined SpaceX/xAI into the top 10 most valuable publicly traded companies on US exchanges. It would be one of the biggest global IPOs ever by valuation. (The largest IPO on record is Saudi Aramco, which went public in Saudi Arabia valued at about $1.9 trillion in 2019.)

Various reports had said SpaceX was seeking a valuation topping $1 trillion, and some had even floated a valuation exceeding $1.5 trillion.

Musk’s companies are already extremely interconnected, including Tesla’s recent $2 billion investment in xAI.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5