Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

The world’s richest man is rocketing toward a new milestone.Elon Musk is getting closer to becoming the world’s first trillionaire as his aerospace company, SpaceX, goes public at an astronomical price. At the initial public offering price of $135 per share, his SpaceX stock is worth $688 billion, bringing his total net worth to $971 billion, according to Bloomberg.Before SpaceX’s IPO was priced on Thursday, Bloomberg pegged Musk’s net worth at $696 billion. His private stake in SpaceX accounted for the majority of that; Bloomberg calculated it was worth $426 billion based on a $1.03 trillion valuation. Shares in Musk’s other companies —…

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Philippine officials said Friday that years of disaster-preparedness drills helped prevent a larger casualty toll when one of the strongest earthquakes in 50 years struck the south and left 55 people dead with 31 others missing.The 7.8 magnitude offshore quake, which struck Monday off Sarangani province, injured about 1,120 people and displaced more than 45,000 people, about half them still in emergency shelters, after the quake damaged more than 12,600 houses across farming towns and cities.Many were still too traumatized to return home because of strong aftershocks, officials said.Days after the earthquake hit, more videos of…

Humanoids aren’t quite ready to replace factory workers, but the industry can’t wait. Faced with labor shortages, manufacturers have shown growing interest in startups that promise faster automation without the usual tradeoffs. That’s the bet behind Theker, an AI robotics startup that aims to go beyond robots trained for a single task. “If you always have to put the same cookie in the same box, that works perfectly, but most processes aren’t like that,” co-founder Carla Gómez Cano told TechCrunch. Theker is designed for that messier reality. Unlike humanoid robots designed around a fixed form — think Boston Dynamics —…

Prometheus, the physical AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, the former co-founder of Verily, Google’s life sciences unit, announced it raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation. The new funds came from Bezos himself, as well as from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, among others. This is the second fundraise round for Prometheus, which launched late last year with an initial raise of $6.2 billion, according to CNBC. Prometheus is building what it calls an “artificial general engineer” — software capable of automating the design and manufacturing of complex physical systems, from jet engines to…

That K-pop earworm you’ve had on repeat might not have come from Seoul. It might not even be human.Deezer, the French music-streaming company, launched a free tool on Thursday that lets users scan playlists on its own platform and from competing services — Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and SoundCloud — to find AI-generated tracks.You don’t need a Deezer account to use it, but you will need to give the site permission to access your streaming service of choice. After a playlist is imported, the tool scans it for AI-generated music, highlights any tracks it flags as synthetic, and gives the…

New Yorkers woke up Thursday morning to a giant blow-up figure of the world’s richest person, one day before his already immense fortune is set to inflate thanks to the biggest IPO in history.The big bust of a shirtless and smiling Elon Musk appeared in Times Square overnight, adorned with harsh accusations about the SpaceX founder.”SpaceX’s Grok makes AI child porn,” reads a giant tattoo plastered across the bust’s upper abs and back.The message appeared to be a reference to accusations that Grok, Musk’s xAI chatbot that was acquired by SpaceX earlier this year, produced sexual images of children.In response…

For once, SpaceX is ahead of schedule: Elon Musk’s space and AI conglomerate officially confirmed that it has raised $75 billion from the sale of its shares to its underwriters, who are set to begin marketing the company on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday. SpaceX priced its 555.6 million shares at $135 each, the company said in an update on its website. That makes SpaceX officially the largest IPO in history, easily eclipsing the $24.9 billion in funds raised by Saudi Aramco during its 2019 public markets debut. At this price, the deal also looks set to make Musk the…

SpaceX makes its public debut on Friday and some investors who backed the company through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) still don’t know how many shares they’re entitled to or whether they’ll get any shares at all. Investing through SPVs, where multiple parties pool their money to invest in a single company, has been around for a while. But SpaceX represents an unprecedented case of an IPO with multiple layers of these vehicles. Since demand for SpaceX allocations has been so high in recent years, investors in an SPV have occasionally formed a new SPV from their shares, creating a structure…

The way Jeff Bezos sees it, AI and the data centers that support the novel technology are like knives.”You don’t want to accidentally outlaw the knife because it can be used in a bad way,” the Amazon cofounder said on CNBC on Thursday.”Knives are important tools and yes, every once in a while they get misused by someone, but you don’t say the solution to that isn’t to say, ‘OK, no more data centers, right? No more knives.’ That’s not a smart approach to regulation.”Bezos said that government regulation has a lot of “reasonable” purposes, pointing to federal regulatory agencies…

The cybersecurity startup Tanium, which was last valued at $9 billion, recently underwent a leadership reshuffle after losing five top executives.Tanium, based in the Seattle area, was founded in 2007 and has stayed private since then. It has raised nearly $1 billion, according to PitchBook, and is backed by investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, TPG, and Salesforce Ventures.Tanium hired its chief financial officer, Marc Levine, in 2021 to conduct a “readiness assessment” for an initial public offering. Several employees and executives had left Tanium in the past few years over uncertainty about whether the company would ever go public, Business…