SpaceX Goes Public While Pokemon Go Secretly Armed Drones

SpaceX is burning through cash at a rate that would evaporate its entire $75 billion IPO haul in roughly two and a half years — and Wall Street is still lining up four deep for every available share.

The rocket company officially started trading on Nasdaq on June 12th under the ticker SPCX at $135 per share, marking what would be the largest public offering in market history. The sheer scale of demand has almost certainly pushed the price most retail investors will actually pay well above that opening figure. Getting in early on this one was never really an option for ordinary people.

The numbers behind SpaceX are genuinely staggering, even before you get to the red ink. The company controls roughly 82 percent of all US space launches and holds nearly half of the global commercial space market. Starlink, its satellite internet arm, crossed 10 million subscribers earlier this year and throws off the kind of margins that make traditional telecom executives weep quietly into their quarterly reports.

But the financials underneath all that market dominance are a mess. SpaceX lost around $4.9 billion in 2025, with billions more burned in early 2026, almost entirely because of its aggressive push into AI data centers. It is a company simultaneously winning the space race and lighting money on fire in a separate building.

The IPO comes after SpaceX merged with xAI — Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company that also owns X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — earlier this year. That deal pushed the combined entity's valuation to $1.25 trillion. It also means investors buying into SPCX are getting exposure to Musk's entire sprawling empire, whether they want it or not.

The S-1 filing SpaceX submitted to the SEC in May was unusually candid about the risks embedded in that structure. It listed Musk himself as a risk factor, flagging that his other ventures could compete with SpaceX for critical supplies and talent. It also detailed an extensive web of related-party transactions — SpaceX buys vehicles and energy products from Tesla, leases space to the Boring Company, and Tesla holds nearly 19 million SpaceX shares converted from its earlier xAI stake.

Musk is positioned to control 85 percent of the voting shares post-IPO, which means public shareholders are essentially along for the ride on whatever he decides to do next. Mars colony ambitions and orbital data centers are listed in the prospectus as genuine strategic goals, which tells you something about the gap between the vision being sold and the near-term financial reality.

Even passive investors may end up with exposure here. Nasdaq recently updated its index rules in ways that could funnel SpaceX stock into broad market funds automatically. You might own a piece of this rocket ship without ever placing a single trade.

Tens of millions of people spent years wandering their neighborhoods, phones pointed at statues and storefronts, hunting cartoon creatures — and in doing so, they quietly built one of the most detailed 3D maps of the physical world ever assembled, which is now being used to navigate military drones.

Niantic Spatial, an AI company spun out of Pokemon Go developer Niantic in May 2025, trained its geospatial AI model on 30 billion images collected largely through the location-scanning features baked into Pokemon Go and the Scaniverse app. Players were rewarded in-game for capturing short video scans of public landmarks from multiple angles, often under varying lighting and weather conditions. The resulting dataset came with precise metadata about where each phone was pointing and when — exactly the kind of richly labeled visual data that AI researchers dream about.

The technology Niantic Spatial built from all those scans is called a visual positioning system. Rather than relying on GPS — which is unreliable in dense urban environments and can be actively jammed in conflict zones — the system figures out a device's exact location and orientation by matching its camera feed against a detailed 3D reference map. That capability is useful for delivery robots navigating city blocks. It is also extremely useful for autonomous drones operating in places where satellite navigation has been knocked out.

Niantic Spatial announced a partnership with Coco Robotics in March 2026 to use the technology for four-wheeled delivery bots. A separate deal struck in December 2025 with a spatial intelligence company with documented military ties surfaced the more uncomfortable application — drone navigation in GPS-denied environments, the kind of scenario that describes active warzones.

The company's position on player consent is technically defensible and practically thin. A spokesperson confirmed the scanning feature was optional and pointed to privacy policy disclosures dating back to 2019 stating that scans would improve the technology platform. Burying a note about future AI training applications in a privacy policy that nobody reads is a long way from informed consent, especially when the downstream use involves weapons systems.

This situation fits a pattern that has become familiar across the AI industry. Platforms collect behavioral and visual data under broad terms, that data gets used to train models, those models get licensed to whoever is paying, and users find out about the military applications years later in a magazine article. The gap between what people think they are agreeing to and what they are actually agreeing to keeps getting wider.

For Pokemon Go specifically, the irony is almost too neat. A game built around the premise of exploring the real world and cataloguing what you find turns out to have been, in part, a extraordinarily effective and cheap data collection operation. The Pokemon were never really the point.