The SpaceX Sham The chief scandal of the AI boom is not the secretive financial machinations of tech oligarchs, but how much money they have raised on the open promise of an automated, transhumanist future. Elon Musk before the launch of a test flight of the SpaceX Starship in November 2024. (Brandon Bell/Getty) On June 12, SpaceX went public at a valuation of $1.75 trillion, the largest IPO in history, minting Elon Musk into the world’s first trillionaire, at least for a few weeks. The company occupies a legitimate market niche as a private spaceflight vendor for NASA and as a global satellite-based internet services provider through Starlink. But its future value hinges on the ostensibly stratospheric growth potential of Musk’s other venture, xAI, which combines X (formerly Twitter) and Grok (the preternaturally bigoted, deepfake-producing large language model).…