Berber Jin

The question is, are they buying the narrative that the company is selling?

even if you're going to give Elon buy-in to his vision, it is a bet that is very much ambitious.

Some people would even say, you know... Out of this world?

Out of this world, overly idealistic.

And if you're a cynic, right, and I've spoken to a lot of investors who are a little bit more cynical of Elon's motivations, they would say it's just a way for him to save XAI.

He is really willing to do whatever it takes to win in AI.

And it's become clearer than ever that he is willing to leverage the power of other parts of his empire to shore up ex-AI.

Yes, I think that that's exactly the way to look at it.

And I think the IPO will really be an interesting moment in time where we'll see whether he gets rewarded or punished for this acquisition.

And we'll potentially even be able to get a look under the hood of just how much it costs to train AI models.

It'll depend on how they break it down, the financials.

But I mean, we could learn a lot.

I think we will learn a lot from that process.

We've reported that SpaceX is looking to go public as soon as the middle of this year, and this merger definitely throws a little bit of a curveball in those ambitions because SpaceX on its own is a profitable business, and XAI on the other hand doesn't generate a lot of revenue, but it burns through billions of dollars every year on computing costs.

So by merging the two companies together, he's essentially taking a very money-losing, cash-intensive business and

pairing it with SpaceX.

In a blog post, Elon essentially said that the merger is in service of this kind of almost sci-fi-esque vision of building AI data centers in space.

So Elon talked about having SpaceX building a constellation of data centers in space that can power AI training in the future.

And a lot of tech CEOs, including Google's Sundar Pichai and Sam Altman at OpenAI, have talked about space as a new frontier and be able to harness the power of the sun and have more leeway to build data centers in places where there are fewer regulations.

OpenAI's calculus is that whoever goes out first will definitely benefit from a lot of the attention that will come from being the first generative AI company to be a public company, and will be able to access a lot of the public money that is basically just waiting to be put into this new wave of GenAI companies.