Elon Musk, as tech critic Ed Zitron astutely noted, is a master plate-spinner: he always seems to keep the crowd dazzled with an ever-rotating spread of shiny toys.
The plate currently featured front and center, SpaceX, has been wobbling after an underwhelming IPO. So Musk is giving it another hearty twirl: a flashy new AI-integrated device to keep investors on the two-trillion dollar hook.
According to new reporting by the Wall Street Journal, the new device is a handset featuring a sleek design “slimmer than an iPhone,” engineered to run on a proprietary SpaceX operating system.
A prototype of the odd new gadget was first shown to select investors ahead of the company’s initial public offering earlier in June. Per the WSJ, some of the people familiar with the handset said it will integrate “AI technology” from Musk’s xAI company, using Qualcomm Snapdragon chip architecture.
The only problem, obviously, is that the market is already flooded with smartphones. There are many companies already making them, and they all have access to every existing AI model, including Grok, the underwhelming flagship offering from Musk’s xAI, now a part of SpaceX.
If the move sounds desperate, consider that Musk has struggled to keep his hardware plates spinning recently, most notably his Optimus robot, which has faced repeated delays on its way to the assembly line. Tesla is likewise faltering on the hardware side, particularly where the company’s self-driving Robotaxis are concerned.
SpaceX, meanwhile, is buckling under the weight of its own IPO. Though shares of SpaceX peaked at $225, they now stand in the mid-$150s, erasing nearly all gains since the company began trading. That has had a ripsaw effect on Musk, who is now vacillating between being the world’s first active trillionaire and the world’s first former-trillionaire.
So far, the hardware announcement hasn’t given SpaceX stock any special sauce: its shares slid all afternoon after the news came out, falling nearly eight percent before the end of the day.