An advocacy group argues that SpaceX's new public shareholders are exposed to lawsuits and regulatory fallout tied to Grok, the AI chatbot the group argues SpaceX now effectively owns through its connection to X.
A giant inflatable Elon Musk stood bare-chested in Times Square on Thursday, one day before SpaceX's landmark IPO, with a message printed on its chest and back that left no ambiguity about the target: "SpaceX's Grok makes AI child porn," according to a CNET report on the demonstration.
The caricature, complete with a pronounced belly, was erected just outside Nasdaq's global headquarters on West 42nd Street on June 11, 2026, the eve of SpaceX's first day as a public company, CNET staff writer Omar Gallaga reported. Bloomberg photographer Michael Nagle captured the scene, and the inflatable was rolled up and removed by midday.
The protest was organized by a group calling itself Safe AI Now, or SAIN, which does not publicly identify its leadership or members, per CNET. The group argues that Grok, the AI chatbot built by xAI and integrated into X, has faced allegations and complaints about sexualized images of minors that spread on social media, and that the high-profile SpaceX IPO is shifting public attention away from those harms. The financial pitch to the new public shareholders is direct: because, as SAIN argues, SpaceX now owns Grok through its connection to X, every investor in the newly public company inherits "every Grok lawsuit, criminal investigation, and regulatory fine that is coming," SAIN said, according to CNET.
SAIN's anonymity makes its framing an advocacy argument rather than a neutral analyst read. The underlying pressure, though, is real in SAIN's view: Grok has faced allegations, legal threats, and regulatory complaints about sexualized images of minors. With SpaceX now public, that pressure reaches a new audience of shareholders who, until Thursday, did not own any part of the AI chatbot.
A representative for SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment, CNET said. The protest, then, is the first public test of how SpaceX, now a public company, will answer for the AI products in its corporate family. The inflatable named the chatbot. The market opened the next morning. What newly public SpaceX shareholders are being asked to absorb is the gap between the two.