@zarfeblong I think it's the other way around. SpaceX IPO as-is would be fine, a lot of people want to buy it, they have actual tech, product and revenue. Meanwhile xAI is, even by AI company standards, a piece of shit burning through money and recently also losing quite a few top people with not that much to show for it.
Musk would still like his AI though, so the idea is to have people who want to buy SpaceX subsidize xAI. He is also astroturfing the numbers and pulling strings to get the SpaceX+xAI monstrosity into one of the big indexes so index funds would effectively prop up the price. See yesterday's piece on Alphaville: https://www.ft.com/content/59adbe42-ca30-47f3-9cda-5415945e9368 (registration probably required) @cstross