He spells it out, which is, you know, first data centers in
space, then stuff on the moon, then Mars and the light of
consciousness extended everywhere.
And that's the vision. And if you just take a look at
what's going on down here on Earth right now, it seems a bit
more like someone is combining a lot of his very costly ventures
together and hoping that some magical synergies will emerge.
This is a race between the US and China.
Yes, these companies are big, but they have one thing in mind,
which is not just to beat each other, but also to beat, you
know, the world's second biggest superpower.
Should we have concerns that so much power potentially is in one
man's hands and that man is Elon Musk?
Hello and welcome to the forecast, Elon Musk.
SpaceX has acquired his AI startup, merging his two most
ambitious companies into a trillion dollar entity, the most
valuable private company the world has ever seen.
And he says this is only the beginning, describing the merger
as the start of a new book in a mission to build space based
data centres, harness the power of the sun and scale AI far
beyond anything possible on our planet Earth.
But behind the cosmic ambition lies a bigger question.
Is this trillion dollar valuation grounded in reality or
is it another example of Musk's ability to bend markets,
investors and public attention, don't forget, to his unique
vision. Well, to discuss it all, we're
joined by our economics correspondent, the Channel 4
News Heliot Ebrahimi and Jacob Silverman, who's author of
Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon
Valley. Jacob, were you expecting this?
Because there was sort of chatter about Musk doing
something along these lines, wasn't there?
And it's not like he hasn't merged his companies but before.
Yeah. I think there was some reporting
the last week that he had been looking for some kind of
internal tie up between some of his companies.
And as you said, I think this is something that Musk has done
before, most recently last year when he combined X&X AI.
So his social network and his AI company, both money losers of
the AI company, of course, drains a lot more resources.
So this does seem to be in line with his tendencies.
It's just doing something on a far bigger scale perhaps than
we've seen him do before, and really concentrating, as you
said, his interests into one big entity.
Yeah, you you've both made the point about the XAI aspect of
this being sort of loss making it losing billion dollars a
month. I think what Jacob said, it's
quite interesting, you know, this is a pattern and by the
way, it's not always successful. He also requested Tesla
investors agree to invest in X AI and 57% of them said they
didn't really fancy it. Although he's managed to
persuade them, now he is forever trying to conglomerate, as you
said, Kieran, get get his this power base together because he
thinks that essentially if you merge these technologies, you
are going to win the AI race. Now whether that is smokescreen,
you know, whether that is kind of a call to legitimacy just by
saying, look, we're, we're we're by being bigger, we're going to
by owning the future. It gives him some kind of
foundation, essentially to say that it's justified that you
bring together a business that has NASA contracts, that has EV
cars, that has a AI compute and bring it all together and launch
it into Mars. Yeah, Jacob, I mean, he's
competing in the AI sphere with Google, with Meta, with open AI.
There's this rush to build data centres, isn't there?
Is it? The only way that Elon Musk can
compete in the AI sphere is to sort of loop it in with SpaceX,
which actually is valuable, is attracting investment and is
making money. Well, I think the capital
expenditures, expenditures, excuse me, with AI have gotten
so huge that the promises and sort of ideas surrounding him
have also had to scale in proportion.
I mean, we weren't really hearing about data centers in
space before sometime last year. And now it seems to be the
latest way forward. And I find it a little dubious,
but this is seems to be must latest promises that somehow
this can't be done down here on Earth, it can only be done in
space. But by the way, he's not the
only one, right? You've got Jeff Bezos up there.
You've got NVIDIA investing. You've got the former boss of
Google, Eric Schmidt. Everybody seems to be looking at
space as a cheaper alternative. Why?
Because apparently you've got 24/7 solar power you can use.
You've got the ability to create data centres without water,
perhaps without citizens, without politicians, you've got
less regulations. And this race that we've got at
the moment where various companies are spending hundreds
of billions of pounds trying to build out AI data centres
without really the infrastructure in place.
That is the problem. The infrastructure, the energy
needs, the water needs, they're not in place.
And so these companies are looking for easier, cheaper
answers. So is he there and Jacob sort of
going for first mover advantage as the guy that puts data
centers in space? So while everyone else is
scrabbling around trying to acquire land and energy and
water down here on planet Earth, Musk's vision is is rather more
intergalactic. Yeah, I think he's trying to
leverage what he has with SpaceX, which is that right now
they are the leader in in putting stuff in space in, you
know, launching satellites in particular.
And they can do it more cheaply than a lot of their competitors,
including Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin.
Bezos has talked about putting infrastructure in or
manufacturing in space actually for a number of years.
So it is kind of this potential first mover advantage.
What needs to happen though is the cost of putting a kilogram
of any material in space or just putting the stuff in space needs
to go way down. There needs to be a lot of
innovation in how you run a data center, how you replace it's
hardware every five years perhaps.
But it is this dream of them being 1st and being kind of
beyond the strictures of Earth so that, as Helia said, they can
access unlimited solar energy perhaps.
Heli, just on that point then, I mean, is it potentially if not
now obviously, but in future going to be cheaper to have data
centers in space, going to be more financially viable to do it
up there down here? That is the claim that you save
both on the energy corset so that in terms of cooling gets
easier, and some of the reports by different consultancy firms
claim that it would be 50% cheaper.
And of course you don't have part of the infrastructure
around water that you would need here on lowly planet Earth.
But of course, all of this feeds Kieran into Musk's kind of
rather grandiose vision of him self, you know, not just
creating data centres that, as he put in his blog post, is
going to serve, you know, the citizens of Earth, but is
actually going to help create self, you know, serving the
civilizations that will ultimately end up in Mars.
So it is this really big big ideas.
Yeah, you can't. You can't fault the ambition,
Jacob, can you? But I mean, I don't know, it
feels like this is all happening so quickly.
And then today, here we are talking about what?
Maybe factories on the moon Jacob.
Yeah, it could seem a little grandiose, certainly.
And also just like, ripped from the sci-fi novels of must Youth,
which has always been away. He's seen the world or the
universe, the cosmos. I mean, he has long said he
wants to name his city on Mars, Terminus, after an Isaac Asimov
novel or series of novels. And I would encourage people
actually to go to the SpaceX website and read the blog posts
that Hell he was referring to because he spells it out, which
is, you know, first data centers in space, then stuff on the
moon, then Mars and the light of consciousness extended
everywhere. And, you know, there the that's
the vision. And if you just take a look at
what's going on down here on Earth right now, it seems a bit
more like someone is combining a lot of his very costly ventures
together and hoping that some magical synergies will emerge.
But if if you peel away, hell yeah, some, some of this, the
space stuff is it's actually quite a cool headed business
decision because you you've got the XAI which which is losing
money folded in with SpaceX, which is going to float
publicly, we think sometime this year that can sort of 1 can
subsidise the other. SpaceX needs AIAI needs SpaceX,
doesn't it? And, you know, his other
businesses, people like, you know, companies like Tesla,
which he wants to work with XAI as well.
He wants XAI to be making, you know, operational AI programmes
within those cars as well. He wants Tesla to move into a
robotics firm. Yeah.
I mean, clearly there is a industrial use case from a
capital perspective. You know, there's been lots of
talk about the huge funds. I saw a report that was
suggesting that, you know, there are 10 start AI startups that
saw just last year alone their valuation increase by a trillion
dollars. That's, you know, companies
including Open AI. These are AI startups.
So these are huge amounts of valuation being added to this
company. I mean, in fact, even just in
this deal alone, I would tell you that SpaceX, he's he's upped
the valuation just from December, it's gone up by 200 or
so billion dollars for Spacex's value.
So the kind of money you're talking about is huge.
The kind of cap X required to, you know, build out the
infrastructure is huge. And so all of these businesses
at the moment, all of these companies are busy trying to
create some kind of circular financing, some ways of bringing
money in. And by bringing money into an
enlarged Group, A super company that's going to list on the
stock market and raise all of this cash, it also not only does
it give that company money to spend and it kind of starves the
ecosystem and his rivals from getting some of that capital.
Because he wants to compete, doesn't he?
In the AI field? But he hasn't got the capital in
X AI to do it, has he? Well, I think exactly.
And I think that there is a, there is a feeling within tech
bosses in the US that it's winner take all.
And therefore you should do everything you can to, to, to
build out as fast as you can to go towards AGI as fast as you
can because the gains are going to be so massive.
So it doesn't matter if you inflate the industry along the
way. It doesn't matter if there's a
whole lot of market turmoil because there will be one or two
companies at the end who will, you know, reap the rewards.
And if it's winner take all, Jacobs isn't it?
I mean, Elon Musk gonna want to be the winner.
Oh yeah, that's absolutely his motivation.
And I think as, as we're getting at here, that the winner is
going to come at least the the notion, I the popular notion
among a lot of these startups and these big income and tech
companies is that the winners coming by just spending the most
money and scaling the infrastructure as much as
possible. I mean, there has been some
questioning within the AI industry that, you know, is just
scaling LLM's the the sort of current models we have the way
to go. But that certainly seems to be
what what must thinks. And he I think also the point
about how SpaceX was valued at 800 billion before just in
December, now 1 trillion now shows also how this kind of
scaling is working, which is that the more often he does
these deals, including just raising capital every couple
months, it seems for for AI purposes in some of these, in
some of his companies, every time he gets to kind of pump up
their value and say they're worth more.
And this is also part of kind of circular economy that Musk has
made, made for himself what's been called the Muskani.
I mean, he's always kind of, if not merging things, then doing
deals between his companies frequently now raising capital,
especially for X AI. And each time is, you know,
there's more money being spent, more money being raised, but
also a higher valuation on paper for for these companies.
But you can't just make up numbers.
I mean, if you're going to float, can't.
Can't you query? If you're going to float this
new super company, hell yeah. Surely there has to be some sort
of basis in reality for I know AI everyone is over inflating
left right and centre but I don't know what you think.
Listen, I think there the, the problem you have at the moment
is there is so much investor appetite in AI that you get this
kind of real sense of fear of missing out and that blinds
people to what those valuations mean.
What, what, what are you looking for?
Are you looking for profits? Well, all of these companies are
potentially going to fail. Are you looking for growth?
And then what kind of growth are you talking about and what are
the hurdles? And a lot of investors in the
current wave have been, you know, pushing aside red flags
really because they're so desperate to be involved and be
included on some of these big name tickets because because the
gains that we're talking about, you know, the way these
companies talk up, you know what NVIDIA is going to mean.
I mean, there are there are VC firms that think, well, if we
don't buy in, we're going to miss out completely.
And I think the same is true. Or this is this is what Musk
would obviously like you to believe, that if you are not
investing here, that you are not going to be part of this new
industrial revolution, this AI revolution, which is going to
completely change the economy. But the the more Elon Musk
merges his various enterprises, Jacob, are you investing in any
one of those companies in reality or are you now in future
just whether it's you know, Tesla or SpaceX just investing
in Elon Musk? I think it's the latter.
And you know, this is certainly a move towards what's been
called Musk Corp or Musk Inc, you know, just one large Musk
mega Corp. And given how involved he's
always been in his companies, you know, spread across 5 or 6
of them at, at any given time, at least it's always been about,
I think for a lot of his investors investing in Musk.
And that's why also we see a lot of the same investors investing
across the Musk companies. I mean, this is venture
capitalist, certain financiers who are friends with Musk and
also the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds,
especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar and and a number of these
entities have repeatedly kind of ponied up for mosque or a
multiple rounds of XAI for example and it.
And he's building, he's building data centers out there, too.
Yeah. And so I think this is very much
about, you know, using those resources that and sort of that
that strength of personality and celebrity that only he can seem
to bear bring to bear on these mega projects.
Do you think do you think that's going to carry through when he
floats this mega company if it happens this this summer, then
Jacob, that force of personality or investors looking for
something else? Well, I, I think there's a
question of when will the music stop?
And there have to be some major returns and actual innovations
here. I mean, the same might be said
for some of the other AI companies, especially like Open
AI, which is committed to spending more than a trillion
dollars on data center infrastructure, but doesn't
necessarily have that money and doesn't have to show signs of
having that kind of revenue ahead.
So Musk can kind of carry on this kind of dance longer, I
think especially as he does these these mergers and he has
such a wide portfolio of interests.
But eventually, some of these returns will will finally have
to materialize, and he has been able to push the ball down the
road with things like full self driving.
His promises keep changing, but you know, just this week he said
that there will be. Dating quite a lot.
Yes and just. Right.
I mean, like news that he fails his own metrics quite often.
Yeah, but he does seem to get forgiven by his investors, which
is. Extraordinary.
It is extraordinary. And, you know, he said just this
week we're gonna have data centers in space within two to
three years. I mean, last month he was saying
in five years is any of this stuff going to happen?
And especially some of these major investors like the Middle
Eastern sovereign wealth funds kind of get tired of this
eventually because they will need their returns even as they
want the kind of influence over must that they can have already.
Yeah, if you're talking about actual market performance, we've
got some Tesla car sales numbers didn't be in Europe recently and
they were down at 42% in France, year on year to January, they
only sold 661. Yeah, there.
Was some worrying numbers if you're an investor in Tesla,
aren't they? Yes, yeah.
But I mean, it's no longer an EV firm, Kieran.
It's now going to be a robotics firm and a taxi firm.
So. So, you know, don't worry about
that. I mean, BYD, obviously when it
comes to Tesla, he's had a real encroachment into the top spots
by Chinese BYD, especially in Europe.
And then you've had all of these tax subsidies taken away in
Trump's presidency and that has really damaged Tesla.
But he is trying to pivot now to robotics to I can't remember
what his what is his robot called exactly?
Do you? Think he's giving up on cars,
Sir Jacob? Do you think he's all robots?
Now, well, this is The thing is, I mean, he seems so committed to
Tesla, but now, you know, suddenly it's robots.
And I mean, the few demonstrations we've seen of
optimists have been unimpressive.
And a number of them we've, there's been confirmed reporting
that these were basically remote controlled by human operators.
I mean, they're the, I think Musk is running out of runway
and promises he can make in, in some ways.
And I think that the point about the, the BYD cars is very
important. The Huawei and other Chinese
brands. And we had the CEO Ford talking
about how he bought one of the Chinese cars, I believe a Huawei
or BYD had it brought to the US and he loved it and felt rather
jealous of it. And as you said earlier, the
numbers are, are, aren't there. I mean, the, the, the sales are
dropping around the world. And you know, this is also about
must politics, which is, you know, Tesla was how he was
reaching a lot of consumers and also his sort of soft
underbelly. And now he has alienated a lot
of people, especially in Europe where he is very active in kind
of right wing agitation. And people would rather buy cars
that are cheaper and better and don't come with that kind of
political baggage attached. If we're talking about
competition with China, and then you look at a company like
SpaceX, which is now going to be even bigger, it's unique, isn't
it? SpaceX there's, there's nobody
else doing what SpaceX is doing. Yeah.
And I think that's one of must remaining strengths, which is
that the the US government, certainly the Department of
Defense needs SpaceX for its launch capabilities and and has
subsidized it to to that extent and given it a lot of contracts.
What might be a little weaker about SpaceX, and this is again,
speaks to the kind of person Musk is and trying to fulfill
these science fictional fantasies, is the amount of
money that's been invested in Starship and this plan to
eventually go to Mars. I mean, he's kind of ignored or
at least not emphasized the core business of basically satellite
launch and putting cargo into space, which they do pretty
well. But also, you know, in favor of
of paying a lot of money and pouring a lot of resources into
this dream of making a massive Starship that can take us deeper
into the cosmos. But it's interesting, Karen,
that, you know, he's really infiltrated the, the kind of
NASA contract space, you know, when, when SpaceX was first
formed, they undercut rivals. They bid really cheaply, you
know, back in 2002 or 2000 and sorry, 2008 and, and now all of
these contracts. I mean, it's very hard to
imagine how NASA could have the capabilities to ferry their
equipment and their astronauts to the Space Center without
SpaceX. So these are companies that are
using, you know, government contracts, taxpayer money
essentially to to help them grow, to help them develop.
And then of course, they become very powerful, very dominant.
And it's very hard for governments then to pull
themselves out of these relationships.
So, so let's let's go big picture, you know, about like
what, what on earth is he actually up to or what in space
is he actually up to, you might say in this scenario?
Because is he this visionary that is able to see into the
future in the way that nobody else can?
Or is he just a sort of a risk taker and a gambler?
Which is it? Well, I would say, I would say
more the latter, but also he is someone who kind of drags us
into his vision of the future. I mean, because of especially
now the amount of resources he can deploy.
You know, Musk has put more satellites into space than
anyone. And a lot of that now supports
Starlink, this this global communications network that he
has done a lot to hype and that, you know, provides a useful
service to some. But it is maybe not the kind of
innovation he has claimed it to be.
But again, we are often kind of being forced to play by must
rules. So if he wants to put a million
satellites in the space, despite whatever native consequences
there might be, but that's the that's the new promise, then we
might, given his power and tremendous resources, just have
to follow along and watch as he enacts that.
It's interesting. I when I interviewed Jason
Jensen Huang from the NVIDIA boss, asked him about Musk, he
was very kind of diplomatic on saying, you know, he doesn't
agree with his politics necessarily, but that as a
technologist he is a visionary. So I think within the tech
community, he's seen as a visionary.
He clearly knows how to leverage his celebrity to exert as much
power and influence as possible. I mean, I remember when he
originally bought X, which was Twitter for $44 billion, people
were thinking, you know, what is this all about?
And there's obviously an argument to say it was about
political power. But it's clearly also this idea
that the technologies of the future where computers
important, where AI is important, where data is
important, bringing all of these things together helps your
business grow. So you are able to train your
chatbot, you're able to train Grok on this vast, um, data that
is created by users on X. So the the synergies that he is
able to create and and and take advantage of basically are huge.
You, you mentioned Grok Helly and we obviously had that
scandal in the past few weeks about image generation on Grok
and that that's just one small aspect of his empire and it was
very problematic for. Him and there's pushback, by the
way, here there's pushback here, there's pushback in France where
there's been a raid, there's a there's pushback even in the US.
So it's not that he's completely unencumbered, but you know, his,
his power, our base is, is extraordinary.
Yeah, but but at the same time, we were talking about something
much bigger potentially here, aren't we?
I mean, you know, you said it's the the biggest private company
in the world that he's about to to to create Jacob.
I mean, should we have concerns that so much power potentially
is in one man's hands and that man is Elon Musk?
Certainly. And I think we've seen some
pretty negative consequences already.
And, you know, I think no one needs that much money or power.
And there are uniquely distorting effects from having
so much wealth. I mean, we could talk about the
2024 election alone. And I think actually the point
about Musk buying Twitter slash X for $44 billion and people
kind of thinking, what is he going to do with this is a good
one. Because we saw what he ended up
doing with it, which was that it helped him essentially win the
2024 election and become this enormous propagandists on behalf
of of far right issues and, and often, you know, spread false
information and some horrible lies about people.
So, you know, that is a way in which Musk has unique
capabilities and I think ones that might be, you know, harmful
to democracy. And I don't think in in a lot of
ways, the costs of Musk are necessarily worth the the
supposed societal benefits. And I think that's what people
are starting to see now. But with a $1.2 trillion
company, or however big it might be, by the time it goes public
this summer, he'll have a lot that he'll be able to do.
And Kieran, I mean, these are questions at the moment that are
particularly pertinent because given everything that is
happening in geopolitics where Europe is having to re evaluate
its relationship with the US again, that discussion about do
we just become takers of America?
Tech infrastructure is even more important because if we have
problems with some of these companies, European countries
have very little leverage in reality.
And there's been lots of talk through the years, I remember of
Europe creating their own versions, creating alternatives.
But fundamentally, we are now doing an AI, exactly what we did
with social media companies and search engines, where we are a
taker of US technology, US tech infrastructure.
I mean, one example that I think of all the time is something
that we have a lot of data on in this country, in the UK is
health. Because the NHS brings all of,
you know, the populations, countries, data together.
I mean not perfectly by the way, but it does theoretically bring
our whole country's health record together, which is an
incredible source to train AI on.
And during COVID, the government gave another U.S. company,
Palantir, the contract to help us with some COVID contracts and
they and Palantir did it for a pound.
But by the way, two years later, once the pandemic was over, we
were signing over multi £100 million deals with Palantir to
do different NHS contracts and not just NHS.
It then escalated to be MOD contracts as well.
And in that way we are we are opening ourselves making us more
susceptible in fields possibly where we have the ability to
have home grown talent, but we haven't invested there.
Not really, but to be honest, I don't think they they need to,
you know, there's a lot lacking in, you know, perhaps in the
European tech scene. And I think Hellio was getting
at, you know, this, this kind of dependency that that is
unfortunately the case, the same kind of dependency that maybe
the Department of Defense here in the US has on Musk, you know,
Europe has on a lot of US tech companies.
But, you know, I, I think we don't need necessarily European
CEO's talking about going to the moon or Mars, but we we, you
know, we do need viable alternatives and, you know, a
kind of homegrown text scene and the kind of regulations and laws
and enforcement that European countries want for themselves.
I mean, we did see a little bit of that today with French
authorities rating that the ex office in Paris because the Grok
chatbot has been creating sexualized images of people
without their consent. So, you know, it will be up to,
I think to Europe to and to European countries about what
kind of future they want to create there and how to how to
get there. But you know that that thought
is in the air now just as Europe is trying to think more about
its own self-defense and its role in NATO and its
relationship with the United States.
That same kind of re evaluation of its relationship with US tech
companies and US billionaires is ongoing, I think.
And you mentioned it earlier, Jacob, about Musk Inc and about
that potentially being where we're headed here, that all the
various Musk entities get folded into one with him at the top of
it. I mean, how soon do you think we
could be seeing something like that?
And that's not a given either, is it?
There are obstacles before you can get someone like that.
Yeah. I think there's one question
about first, Tesla is the one publicly traded company at the
moment in his portfolio that might have to stay sort of
nominally independent that way. But I don't see much reason why
all of his other companies might be combined together.
I mean, what what do we have left with the Boring Company?
Neuralink, you know, some of his smaller interests, Neuralink
could be lumped in with robotics and AI.
So I think Musk is someone who likes a lot of control, of
course, like a lot of lot of billionaires, and has long seen
his own role as kind of centralizing all these interests
together. So, you know, if the investors
are on board for another round or two of this, I think by next
year you could see most of us non Tesla companies be just, you
know, under SpaceX or under someone X company.
And where would that sit then? Hellier in terms of the pantheon
of big, powerful, great companies in the world right
now. Well, at the moment NVIDIA is
the world's biggest company listed company.
I think that's on about four and a half trillion dollars.
So you have Microsoft, which had a bit of a stumble last week.
You have Google, Alphabet, the owner of Google.
So these are huge, vast companies.
And I think it's back to that idea of there being a race.
And this isn't just a race between companies, private
companies or listed companies. This is a race between the US,
US and China. And the anxieties that lots of
companies feel in the US about losing out to China as a tech
behemoth, as an AI behemoth. And when we're talking about,
you know, being able to conglomerate data, you know, the
best in class is really the Chinese government.
No one really competes with that.
So yes, these companies are big, but they are all all, they have
one thing in mind, which is not just to beat each other, but
also to beat, you know, the world's second biggest
superpower. Yeah, quite.
And potentially to have more power than the governments that
we elect, right, Jacob? Yes.
And I think that is 1 concerning thing of course, about the power
of tech companies and the geopolitical role they play.
Now. I think one important
distinction also here that we should note is that most of the
companies we're talking about are the competitors to Musk are
publicly traded. Not all of them like open AI, of
course, but these, these most valuable companies in the world.
And because of the way public markets work and for example,
SEC filings here in the US, we know more about what these
companies do and the profits they they generate and, and
where they get their revenue from.
And if we have some giant Musk Corp that's privately held,
which is where we are right now, we know a lot less about how his
business empire operates. And, and is it making money?
You know, is it, is it making profits?
So that is a little bit of of a different animal I think than
you know, the comparisons to NVIDIA or Google or Microsoft
are really important, but also that that distinction I think
will make it a different kind of operator.
There will have to be a prospectus care and there will
have to actually be, you know, line items about where the
revenue is coming from, about what the margin is, about who
the customers are. All of that detail will be, you
know, a level of transparency we haven't seen before.
And even today's deal, you know, the scant information about it
and that if it's if this company becomes listed, will change.
Well, let's let's end where we started them with the with the
prospect, you know, this new merged company actually being
listed. I mean, there's going to be a
lot of hype around that isn't that.
It's going to be one of the the biggest things that the market
has seen for quite some time. Yeah, I I was curious when I was
reading about this merger yesterday on Bloomberg, I
believe just on the news site and right below the the news
article about it, there was an opportunity to Click to find out
how to invest in SpaceX. How how I could, you know, buy
shares. And so I think that is very
indicative of what you were saying.
This is going to be a sort of mass consumer event of course
and but also a big market event. But you know because of must
celebrity and the kind of public facing nature of him and his
companies, this is going to be more than just you know another
big M&A. Would you compare it hellier to
sort of the early 2000s when we we saw some of the big tech
companies go public then? Well, I mean, we, we are
definitely in a bubble, which is what you're alluding to.
I think the the question here is, you know, it's always you
get that same kind of comparison, which is, you know,
can you be in a bubble and can the bubble burst?
But still the technology is transformative and the survivors
of that burst bubble make such significant gains that everyone
needs to be invested. And I think that is the problem
we have at the moment is that even though you've had all of
the all of the chief executives and founders from these AI
companies all concede themselves that there is an AI bubble.
You are still having money flowing into this this sector.
You are still having both VC money flowing and you're still
having the idea of these mega IPOs.
I mean, to raise $30 billion.50 billion dollars on the stock
market is a huge quantum of money.
I think the next biggest was Saudi Aramco on something like
$29 billion. And by the way, they were quite
a simple company. They had, you know, oil revenue
and you could see that. So investors knew what they were
buying into here year. I think it's about when does as
Jacob was saying, when does the music stop?
Do they get to IPO before there is some real market volatility?
Because that changes the the the equation completely are?
You in the predictions game, Jacob, do you like?
Do you like the prediction? Only as a as a hobby I guess
it's not one of monetized yet on these new prediction markets I.
Was going to ask you when the music is going to stop.
You know, I, I've been, I'm a skeptic and I guess I've been
wondering that about Musk. I mean, I think some of his
based on his own personal behavior, I mean, he has been,
of course, more erratic and can he sort of maintain some of the
alliances and, and the veneer at least of legitimacy that he
needs? But I think we'll probably get
to some kind of public offering this summer and see where we
might proceed from there. But, you know, in the next few
years, some of his fantastical predictions will finally have to
come true and start returning revenue, and I think that's when
the music does stop. Jacob Silverman, author of
Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalisation of Silicon
Valley. That was really interesting.
Thank you so much. I'm Helia Ebrahimi, our
economics correspondent here at Channel 4 News as well.
You've been listening to the forecast.
See you again soon.