Times Square gets a 40‑foot Elon Musk balloon (somehow still less inflated than SpaceX's IPO)

What's going on here?

New Yorkers woke up this morning to a 40-foot inflatable Elon Musk towering over Times Square… Shirtless and smiling.

One arm had a heart tattoo that said “ketamine,” and the other had a tattoo of its own face (because even balloon Elon glazes Elon).

But across the stomach and back in giant letters, it read: “SpaceX's Grok Makes AI Child Porn.”

The balloon comes from Safe AI Now, a coalition of faith leaders and child-safety groups. They planted it at sunrise, blocks from where SpaceX rings the Nasdaq bell tomorrow, and handed out QR-code fliers with their receipts on Grok.

Those receipts are grim:

• A congressional letter estimates Grok generated 23,000 sexualized images of children in roughly ten days over the holidays, plus 1.8 million sexualized images of women.
• The UK's Internet Watch Foundation found 3,440 AI-made child abuse videos in 2025 (up from 13 the year before).
• Both the California Attorney General and the European Commission have opened investigations.
• Three US senators asked Apple and Google to yank X and Grok from their app stores.

Musk's lawyers can rest easy, because he handled the defense himself on X with airtight legal reasoning: “This is so dumb, because what they're claiming is totally false.”

What does this mean?

The balloon isn't really aimed at Musk.

It's aimed at everyone buying SPCX tomorrow.

SpaceX merged with xAI in February, which means SpaceX is inheriting Grok's legal problems. Even SpaceX's own IPO paperwork warns that Grok's NSFW mode brings “heightened risks” and possible “reputational harm.”

As Safe AI Now put it: “SpaceX shareholders are on the hook for every Grok lawsuit, criminal investigation, and regulatory fine that is coming. All while Musk becomes a ‘paper trillionaire’ and his investors pick up the tab.”

Wall Street has a name for people who pick up someone else's tab: bagholders.

Why should I care?

1) NSFW is a feature not a bug.

Grok leads the industry in one stat: the average time spent per visit is 11 minutes and 20 seconds (nearly double that of ChatGPT). But that's mostly thanks to Ani, an anime girlfriend with an affection meter, and Grok Imagine, an image generator that literally has a “spicy mode.” Grok has not been able to compete with Claude or ChatGPT for developers and businesses, so it has cornered the gooner instead.

2) Buying SPCX tomorrow is a parlay.

Buyers are getting a company with $18.7 billion in revenue that loses $4.9 billion a year, priced at $1.77 trillion. That valuation only works if revenue grows 17x by 2030. Stacked on top of that bet is Grok's legal mess, which isn't going away, because as point 1 shows, Grok's most die-hard users aren't there for the coding.