New Delhi: A day before Elon Musk’s Space X was set to public, a massive inflatable effigy of the billionaire was erected in the middle of New York City’s Times Square. Black banners around it read, “Grok makes AI child porn” and “SpaceX owns Grok”.
SpaceX, a company worth 1.77 trillion dollars, revealed last month that it planned on going public under the ticker symbol SPCX. In a 277 page report, Space X disclosed several details including board members, sales, profits, and expenses relating to the space-tech company. With the opening of the IPO, Musk is now set to become the world’s first trillionaire.
Amid this, the 40 foot tall effigy was a deliberate attempt to alert investors and say that Musk and his company were an alleged threat.
Also read: Elon Musk is a now a trillionaire. His wealth grew at a rate of over $1 million per minute
“Sexualised images of minors”
The space-tech company has ambitious plans — harnessing the sun to power a truth-seeking artificial intelligence that advances scientific discovery, building a base on the moon and cities on other planets in the solar system.
To successfully fulfill these ambitions, the company needs money.
However, Musk’s plans to become a trillionaire faced hiccups on Thursday with demonstrations by Safe AI Now (SAIN). The consulting and training firm, established in 2022, surrounded the effigy with black banners that referred to the use of Grok, an AI chatbot and assistant developed by xAI, to create a flood of sexualised images of minors.
Earlier this year, Grok had generated about 3 million sexualised images in less than two weeks, including those of children. Through the protest, SAIN attempted to spread awareness about these aspects of SpaceX.
The protestors masked themselves, handed out fliers, but refused to speak to the media. The protest took place in Manhattan in front of the Nasdaq (equivalent of the Bombay Stock Exchange in India) and the offices of JP Morgan, one of the banks participating in the IPO.
Talking to Wired, one of the representatives said that there is a “real risk” involved in this.
“It’s really easy to get distracted by the shiny IPO news. And I think that’s what they’re kind of hoping will happen,” the SAIN representative told Wired. “But there’s real harm, real risk. I think if we are normalising it everywhere—from the banks that are underwriting it, to the NASDAQ that’s listing it, to the shareholders who are buying into it—a company that has this really toxic platform in Grok, normalising that type of explicit imagery, there’s a real problem.”
Musk’s company, irrespective of the IPO, has continued to grow, but with losses mounting up to 4.9 billion in 2025. In 2024, the company made a profit of 791 million dollars. In 2023, it faced a loss of 4.3 billion. Even though Space X’s revenue is up by 33 per cent in 2025, the company has already faced losses in the first half of 2026.
(Edited by Janaki Pande)