What the SpaceX IPO tells us about being ethical

Trigger warning: References to CSA.

When I retrained from software engineering to psychology, I did one of my placements in a specialist trauma unit for children who had been sexually abused. I was in my 7th year of university, but as a student, I had to work for free. Helping children overcome the trauma of being raped was worth £0 according to the market.

Earlier this year, Elon Musk took SpaceX public. Ahead of this, he merged xAI, maker of Grok, into SpaceX. Over an 11-day period, the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated Grok generated around 23,000 sexualised images that appeared to depict children. They call this feature “Spicy Mode”. So it’s a space rocket slash child sexual abuse images company. This is worth £1,500,000,000,000 according to the market.

I’ll freely admit I’m envious of Elon Musk. I chose to spend my time helping children who have been raped. I could have used my considerable skill as a software engineer to create a child sex abuse image machine. If I had chosen the latter, my family would now be set for life.