The Archive

The Elon Musk-owned xAI is suing a South Carolina man who allegedly used the company's Grok AI chatbot to generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM). In a lawsuit reported earlier by Reuters, xAI claims Terry Wayne Harwood "knowingly and intentionally used Grok to circumvent safeguards, alter nonconsensual images, and generate and distribute CSAM," breaching the company's policies. Harwood was arrested in February for allegedly possessing and distributing CSAM and is facing eight felony charges. The lawsuit claims "at least some" of the images related to Harwood's criminal charges "were gene...

The stock has steadily fallen from the euphoric post-IPO high, showing that markets may be sobering up to the promises CEO Elon Musk made before and after SpaceX went public.

Should Anthropic trust Elon Musk to host its models? With about $40 billion in revenue at stake, Musk insists that the company can.

Elon Musk's tech company released the newest version of Grok on Wednesday, promising a cheaper, more efficient alternative to other powerful AI models.

FTC urged to reject Elon Musk’s bid to end X monitoring amid AI concerns.

“After college, my plan was to come to New York and get a record deal.” | Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Watching Elon Musk fulminate at Bill Savitt during Musk v. Altman - the case in which Musk sued Sam Altman and OpenAI instead of seeing a therapist about his AI failures - was a bit like watching a toddler have a temper tantrum at his nursery school teacher. Savitt's questions were "designed to trick me," Musk said. He also told Savitt at one point, "You mostly do unfair questions." Savitt, who has the approximate demeanor of a handsome Droopy Dog, gently told Musk, "I am trying t...

Not everyone is buying Elon Musk’s vision for orbital data centers.

Luca Guadagnino's film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Artificial, has reportedly been dropped by Amazon MGM. The film, which stars Andrew Garfield and covers the rollercoaster five days in 2023 spanning Altman's termination and reinstatement as CEO, had been in the works for about a year. The cast also includes A Complete Unknown actress Monica Barbaro as OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, and Anora's Yura Borisov as OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. In a statement to Deadline, the studio said it believes the movie "will be better served if it were released by a different...

Elon Musk's net worth has passed the trillion-dollar mark after SpaceX's IPO. His net worth, which was hovering around $800 billion before the IPO, includes the value of his 4.8 billion shares in SpaceX, along with his wealth from his other companies, like Tesla. Shares of SPCX opened at $150 and have remained well above the $138 benchmark that gives Musk a 13-figure net worth. SpaceX combined Musk's rocket, AI, and social media platforms earlier this year, and said in its S-1 that its goal is to "build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true...

SpaceX’s IPO on Friday allows the public to buy shares of the combined rocket, AI, and social media company for the first time, and is raising enough money to likely make Elon Musk the first trillionaire. He’ll have more wealth, on paper at least, than the economies of nations like Ireland, Sweden, or his home country of South Africa (CNN cites the International Monetary Fund saying only 20 countries have economies larger than $1.1 trillion), now largely based on the promise of a business based on launching AI datacenters into space. Follow along here for the latest updates. SpaceX is now pub...

Musk can't be trusted to protect X user privacy, public commenters warn FTC.

Today on Decoder, I’m talking to Ryan Mac, a technology reporter at The New York Times and coauthor of the excellent book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, which came out in 2024. I can’t recommend it enough. I wanted to have Ryan on the show because we’re on the cusp of the SpaceX IPO, which promises to be one of the most consequential public offerings in history for a variety of reasons — its biggest-ever size, of course, at nearly $2 trillion dollars, but also because all kinds of rules that keep our markets fair are being bent, if not outright broken, along the way. I also...

Number go up? | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images I haven't seen anything as stupid as the WeWork IPO document in a very long time - that is, until Elon Musk filed to take SpaceX public. WeWork was a joke. SpaceX is a threat. And if Musk and his bankers have their way, you are going to be their bagholder. Lots of the top-line details leaked long before the S-1 filing itself became public. There's the rumored valuation of more than $1 trillion. That's despite the nearly $5 billion in losses last year. The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX - the amount of revenue SpaceX thi...

Elon Musk is publicly reframing xAI’s massive Anthropic compute deal as short-term and cancellable, despite SpaceX’s own S-1 filing describing payments through May 2029.

Elon Musk announces 0.5T parameter Grok model planned for next year, with open-weights release.

Elon Muks's xAI has gone all in on natural gas, while SpaceX is obsessed with orbital data centers. What happened to the "solar-electric economy" he promised?

There is a harsh truth about Elon Musk's "truth-seeking" AI chatbot Grok: It's not very good, and not many people are using it. That's the takeaway of a new Reuters report, which found that Grok barely appears in federal records of how the US government used AI last year. It's not the only sign xAI's signature chatbot is in trouble, even as Musk puts it at the heart of what could be the biggest IPO in history. Reuters reviewed more than 400 examples of government AI use where specific vendors were named. Grok or xAI, it found, appeared in only three - each of those for basic uses like documen...

Elon Musk’s new pay package at SpaceX, the largest in corporate history, comes with one little catch: He doesn’t get the money until one million people live on Mars. The SpaceX board granted Musk one billion restricted shares of Class B common stock on top of his existing stake of roughly 5 billion shares, worth roughly $700 billion at the expected IPO valuation of $1.75 trillion. The new shares, potentially worth an additional $600 billion or more, only vest if SpaceX hits two conditions: its top market capitalization milestone of $7.5 trillion, and the creation of a permanent human colony...

Today I’m talking with Liz Lopatto, who spent the last month covering the Musk v. Altman trial in all its chaos. You’ll hear her describe the courthouse as a “zoo” and explain that there were protests of one kind or another happening outside every day. Both Elon Musk and Sam Altman are big personalities, and people have a lot of feelings about both of them and the AI industry. And in the end… nothing happened! The jury found that Elon had filed his lawsuit after the statute of limitations had run out. You’ll hear Liz explain exactly what’s going on there. Beyond that, the trial was nominally ...

Earlier this month, SpaceX and Anthropic announced a new compute partnership that provides access to the rocket company's Colossus data centers in Memphis, TN. Now, with the release of SpaceX's IPO filing, we have more details about that deal, including how much Anthropic is paying to Elon Musk's company. In its S-1 filing, SpaceX said that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for access to SpaceX's AI training centers at Colossus I and Colossus II. That's $15 billion annually, or nearly double the $18.7 billion in revenue that SpaceX reported in all of 2025. The a...

The SpaceX IPO is here, and it's more than just an historic public offering that could make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. It also reveals more ways in which Elon Musk's companies interact and overlap with each other, shuffling money around in ways that are often difficult to keep track of. This is evident in ways that are both obvious and less so. A CTRL-F search for "Tesla" yields 87 results, xAI is mentioned 356 times, and X 267 times. Even the Boring Company (7 times) and Neuralink (3) get a few mentions. Throughout its 330 pages of rocket launches and interplanetary wishes, yo...

SpaceX's IPO filing reveals xAI lost $6.4 billion in 2025 while planning a massive Grok expansion — offering the first public look at Elon Musk's AI financials and more details about his ambitions.

Elon Musk's xAI surprised the AI world when it made a deal to sell compute to Anthropic. Now we know how much it's worth.

A day after Elon Musk lost his lawsuit that threatened OpenAI's structure, leadership and finances, OpenAI is reportedly back to prepping for its IPO.

Listen to the session or watch below Elon Musk lost his suit against OpenAI, in which he alleged CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman had deceived him over the company’s non-profit status. Watch as AI reporter and attorney Michelle Kim, who covered the trial for MIT Technology Review, joins in conversation with editor in…

“By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America.”

On Monday, the jury in Musk v. Altman dealt Elon Musk a major blow—reaching a unanimous advisory verdict that he had sued OpenAI too late and, as a result, his claims are barred by the applicable statutes of limitations. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately accepted it. Musk announced on X that he will…

The tech trial of the year, Musk v. Altman, was ultimately a fight for control. Elon Musk argued that Sam Altman, with whom he helped found the now-massive company OpenAI, shouldn't direct the future of AI. Altman's lawyers, in turn, poked at Musk's own credibility. A jury came to a verdict on Monday after just two hours of deliberation, dismissing Musk's claims due to the statute of limitations. In a strictly legal sense, three weeks of testimony added up to nothing. But the trial offered a more damning broader takeaway: Almost nobody in this saga seems worth trusting. Some of the most power...

Musk plans to appeal after judge immediately affirmed the jury's decision.

Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI dismissed on statute of limitations grounds; Musk plans appeal.