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Let no one ever accuse Elon Musk of humility. SpaceX has revealed plans to go public in the US. It values itself as $1.25tn, which would make it the biggest stock market listing in history and put Musk’s share at more than $600bn. This is for a company that earned $18.7bn in revenue last year but lost nearly $5bn and expects to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in legal costs to manage an array of lawsuits. But SpaceX is focused on what it describes as a $28.5tn market to make life multiplanetary. Its ambitions include mining asteroids, building space data centres and establishing a civilisation on Mars. AI compute is central to its goals, many of which, with current technology, are for the birds. But the world’s richest man will retain 85% of shareholder voting power, so it will be pretty much impossible to unseat him.
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