Hardcore capitalism certainly brings out the best in humanity. Take Elon Musk, for example. He has reportedly laid out a bet for banks, law firms, auditors and consultants who want to work on the SpaceX IPO. They need to subscribe to the bastion of non-consensual deepfakes and occasional Hitler praise known as Grok.
Surely our country’s best and brightest banks would reject such pay-to-play demands, right? Not good. the new York Times Some of them are reported to have agreed to spend millions of dollars on Grok. Those financial institutions are said to be already integrating chatbots into their IT systems.
Times’ Sources say that this was not an unconditional request. Rather, Musk insisted that they subscribe to Grok as part of the privilege of working on SpaceX’s IPO. He also reportedly asked banks to advertise on X, but was less firm about this. Look? He is a flexible, easy-going person at heart.
Five banks are expected to work on the IPO: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. Meanwhile, law firm Gibson Dunn & Davis Polk is said to be advising. We can probably assume that they all currently have Grok installed on their internal systems. Good time.
SpaceX’s IPO, filed confidentially earlier this week, is expected to raise more than $50 billion and value the company at more than $1 trillion. Since the bank stood to raise more than $500 million from its work on the deal, perhaps paying for Grok, despite its myriad issues, seemed a small price to pay. Look? Excellent people doing great work in the good old America of A.
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