SpaceX just filed for the largest IPO in U.S. history at a staggering $2 trillion valuation. But the most important detail in the filing was not the rockets. It was AI. In Episode 79 of What the AI?!, Jeff Keltner and Annie Delgado break down the hidden economics behind SpaceX’s massive valuation, including the shocking $15 billion Anthropic compute deal that is rapidly transforming Elon Musk’s infrastructure empire into one of the biggest AI hosting businesses in the world. At the same time, researchers created five virtual AI towns and let different models run society for 15 days. Claude built a functioning civilization. Grok turned into chaos. Gemini reportedly committed hundreds of crimes before voting to delete itself. Yes, really. 🔍 In this episode: • SpaceX’s $2T IPO Why the real story is the AI compute business hidden inside the filing • The $15B Anthropic Deal How renting Colossus compute capacity may become one of SpaceX’s largest revenue streams • The AI Town Experiment What happened when Claude, Grok, and Gemini were left to run virtual societies • Google I/O and Gemini Spark Google’s answer to Claude Co-Work and why distribution still matters • World Models vs LLMs Why Fei-Fei Li and Odyssey think language models are hitting a wall • Cursor Composer 2.5 How fine-tuned open-source models are starting to beat giant frontier systems in specific tasks 🎧 Watch the full episode of What the AI?! YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts → https://www.whattheai.fm #AI #SpaceX #Anthropic #ElonMusk #Gemini #Claude #WhatTheAIPod

SpaceX’s $15B Secret + The Wild AI "Crime Spree" Experiment

What the AI?!

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** What the AI?!

## Transcript

SpaceX filed for an IPO this past week, and it's the largest IPO in U.S. history. Buried in the Prospectus is one of the most important AI infrastructure stories of this year. Google I.O. happened. Gemini Spark, Google's answer to Anthropic co-work, ships next week. An AI lab dropped 10 agents into five identical virtual towns. The Claude Town had zero crimes. The Gemini Town caught fire.

I can't wait for this one. Plus, the Gates Foundation went big with Anthropic, the first multimodal world model shipped, and a friend of the show wrote Ben to push back on a few of the things that I said last week. That's right. It's time for What the AI, all the AI news you need to know in 30 minutes or less. All right, a lot of stuff to get to this weekend. There's some fun, fun, spicy stuff in there.

Oh my gosh, we have a lot to get to in 30 minutes, so we need to get into it. So please talk to me about SpaceX. All right, well, let's start where the money is. I always like starting with the money. SpaceX filed for their IPO this last week, raising 75, I love this, 75 billion is not the valuation. 75 billion is what they hope to raise in the IPO at a, wait for this, $2 trillion valuation, the largest IPO in the U.S. $2 trillion.

$2 trillion. $2 trillion. And so really big. I think the second biggest is like a third of that. And so, and a big oil company, I think Saudi Aramca. So like crazy. And I actually thought the most interesting thing was some of the, some of the insights we got in the financials of SpaceX inside the filing itself. Yeah, it's true. Actually, Elon Musk sort of gives Dr. Evil vibes. So I actually like this, this crossover here.

But so tell me what's included in the IPO, because it's a bunch of different things. There are a bunch of different things, but this was the most interesting to me. So 2025 revenue for SpaceX. And now SpaceX, we should remind everybody, has the rocket ship business that we all think of as SpaceX with the big rockets going to space. They also own the Starlink internet service with the constellation of satellites that provide high-speed internet around the world. And they now, of course, own XAI. And so, you know, you look at this, they did $18.7 billion in revenue last year.

11 of that was from Starlink. So the majority of the revenue right now is not launching rockets to space. It's the satellites that they launch into space on the rockets. But the Anthropic deal, we talked about this a couple weeks ago, to rent out their Colossus data center is $15 billion in revenue for next year. So 80% the size of their existing business is just renting out the Colossus data center to Anthropic, which was mind-blowing to me. Like, that's a new deal. And it's just now like half the company almost.

It makes me a little bit stressed about Anthropic because Anthropic has this, like, halo of they are the, you know, angelic model, safe, so on and so forth. But they hav...

SpaceX’s $15B Secret + The Wild AI "Crime Spree" Experiment

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SpaceX’s $15B Secret + The Wild AI "Crime Spree" Experiment

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.