When companies decide to go public through an initial public offering, their prospectuses are, without exception, unreadable. They are designed to be impenetrable - dense wording with legal qualifications, risk factor boilerplate, and accounting disclosures that protect the issuer while revealing as little as possible to investors. They are written by corporate lawyers and analysts, and read by other corporate lawyers, analysts and institutional investors. The SpaceX prospectus filed on 20 May was prepared by Gibson Dunn, the US law firm where, many years ago, I was a partner, although thankfully I didn’t draft prospectuses.
Musk’s proposed IPO may become the largest public offering in history. But its scale is not what makes it important.
What matters is that beneath the valuation metrics, governance structures, and customary legal disclaimers sits something more consequential: a blueprint for the most vertically integrated information and communications system ever assembled.
As one commentator observed, the prospectus reads “part financial disclosure, part science fiction.” It is also, if you work in media or care about how news and information operate in the modern world, one of the most important and intriguing documents that you will read this year.
Start with the language. This is a legal document filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission that contains the following sentence, which has probably never appeared in an SEC prospectus before:
“We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs.”
It continues in much the same vein, accompanied by 40 pages of stunning photographs of rockets and launch systems.
The stated corporate mission is to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” The prospectus promises investors “an age of abundance with an endlessly prosperous and exciting future” and sets out, as a formal business objective, the goal of propelling humanity to “Kardashev Type II status”, a civilisational classification borrowed from a framework developed in 1964 by a Soviet astrophysicist, Nikolai Kardashev, for measuring how much energy an advanced civilisation can harness from its surrounding universe.
The Numbers
The target valuation is a mind-blowing US$1.75 trillion, rising towards US$2 trillion in some estimates.
SpaceX generated US$18.67 billion in revenue in 2025, placing the IPO at roughly 109 to 116 times trailing revenue. On forward 2026 estimates of US$27 billion to US$30 billion, the multiple reduces to around 58 to 65 times. For context, Apple trades at roughly eight times revenue. To justify its valuation on conventional terms, SpaceX would likely need to generate something approaching US$300 billion in annual revenue within a decade, an amount roughly comparable to New Zealand’s annual GDP, generated by a single private company controlled by a single individual.
Ann Lipton, a corporate law professor based in Colorado, summarised the shareholder rights on offer to investors in seven words: “no votes, no sales, and no suits.” Meaning that Musk controls a majority of the voting rights, investors have limited options to sell, and legal remedies, including lawsuits normally available to aggrieved shareholders, have been substantially curtailed.
The public are effectively being invited to invest in a civilisation-altering vision that Musk controls almost entirely himself, on terms offering very few conventional legal protections to investors in return. The audacity is breath-taking. But set aside the cosmic ambition and financial wizardry, because beneath them sits something far more consequential for anyone who thinks about media, information, or political power.
What Has Actually Been Built
The structure is three interlocking businesses forming the most vertically integrated communications and information stack ever assembled.
The physical layer is SpaceX itself - rockets launching more than 80% of global orbital mass since 2023, alongside Starlink, a constellation of approximately 9,600 satellites delivering high-speed internet to 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries. This is infrastructure that no single government can fully control or interrupt.
The platform layer is X, formerly Twitter, which xAI acquired from Musk in March 2025 before the combined xAI entity was folded into SpaceX in early 2026.
The prospectus is explicit about what X actually is: “a real-time information, entertainment and free speech platform which serves as a foundational distribution and data engine for our AI ecosystem.”
X is effectively the largest real-time record of human opinion, reaction, and discourse ever constructed, a global social graph feeding directly into an AI ecosystem, with approximately 550 million active monthly users generating around 350 million daily posts.
Every one of those posts feeds Grok which functions as the editorial layer.
It reads every post made on X, ranks content, summarises events, answers questions, and increasingly shapes what hundreds of millions of people understand about the world. The prospectus describes it as “truth-seeking”, a claim worth treating with some scepticism, given that truth in this system is ultimately determined by models controlled by SpaceX.
Beneath all of this sits Colossus, the world’s largest AI training cluster, with around one gigawatt of compute power. Although Musk’s plan, as described in the prospectus, is to massively extend Colossus by launching orbital AI data centres into space from as early as 2028. These satellites will be powered by solar energy and cooled by the vacuum of space, thereby bypassing the limits of Earth’s power and water supply.
Each of these layers feeds the next in what the prospectus calls a “self-reinforcing advantage.”
What This Means for Social Media and News Media
Social media as most people understand it, a feed connecting users to content they consciously chose, is already being replaced. Every major platform now interposes an AI editorial layer between content and audience, and on X that layer is Grok, making consequential judgments at billions of interactions per day about what is true, relevant, and worth surfacing, with no meaningful public accountability.
The more people use X, the better Grok becomes at predicting and shaping what people want to read, which shapes what people post, and which in turn generates more training data. It is a flywheel spinning faster with every passing day.
But the architecture is far from perfect. The prospectus is unusually explicit about the risks embedded in this system. It describes exposure to risks related to harmful, misleading or illegal content, accuracy, misinformation and deepfakes, bias, discrimination, toxicity, sycophancy, AI deception, intellectual property infringement or misappropriation, defamation and data breaches.
It points out that Grok offers features or modes designed to generate more candid, direct, less reserved or more irreverent outputs, including “Spicy Imagine Mode” and “Unhinged Voice Mode”. These modes are explicitly acknowledged to present heightened risks, including misinformation or deceptive outputs, potentially explicit content, non-consensual or exploitative imagery, intellectual property infringement, and content that could be viewed as exploitative, harmful, harassing, abusive or discriminatory.
What is emerging, therefore, is not just an AI editorial layer that ranks or summarises information. It is a system that can increasingly rewrite the same underlying content in different tones and degrees of emphasis depending on how it is configured or prompted. The same event can be rendered in a more cautious, more assertive, more sceptical, or more irreverent form, with the framing itself becoming part of the product.
The threat to journalism is structural and already underway. Grok can scrape news and deliver it in summarised form directly to users without a click, an ad impression, or a subscription prompt. In New Zealand, AI is already being used by some newsrooms to summarise news alerts such as NZX announcements, and increasingly the commodity layer of journalism will be automated as the use of AI in newsrooms accelerates.
Input, Not Output
The New York Times and a small number of other major mastheads have grasped this strategic reality and have entered into licensing agreements with Amazon and other AI companies in order to position their journalism as a valuable input into AI systems rather than a commoditised output.
That distinction is everything.
In the world that the SpaceX prospectus describes, the choice facing every news organisation is stark: do you want to be the input or the output? The source of authoritative human judgment that AI systems rely upon and must pay for, or the low value commoditised content that gets scraped by AI and delivered to users in a synthesised and summarised form?
There are defendable areas of journalism that cannot easily be scraped or synthesised because the information either doesn’t exist in publicly accessible form or is difficult to access. For example, political reporting built on networks, sources and leaks, investigative journalism built on chasing leads and whistle-blower information, or human interest stories that require members of the public to trust a journalist to tell their personal story with care and empathy. Commentators, subject matter experts and opinion writers with their own distinctive voices will also be trusted by their readerships to tell them what all the noise means for their country, their community and themselves.
But perhaps the most mind-blowing aspect of the SpaceX prospectus is that it is not a document based entirely upon future possibilities. It describes infrastructure already being built and a flywheel that is already spinning. Fingers crossed, whether Musk succeeds or not, humanity can avoid the fate of the dinosaurs and reach Kardashev Type II. But the more serious and immediate question is whether media institutions built for the last information era can adapt quickly enough to the one now rapidly emerging.
The prospectus is here. The photographs are great, and if you enjoy science fiction you’ll love it.
Lawyer and writer Philip Crump explores political, legal and cultural issues facing New Zealand. Sometimes known as Thomas Cranmer. This article was published HERE
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