The Journal's sources said the device is slim, sleeker than an iPhone even, and it runs on a proprietary operating system built around Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip. It's tied into xAI, the AI lab SpaceX absorbed back in February in a merger valued at around one and a quarter trillion dollars. That's a wild number to picture. Investors got a private look at the prototype in the weeks before SpaceX's record breaking IPO last month, and the pitch inside those meetings sounded cautious rather than confident. SpaceX reportedly told them the project sits at an early stage, the design could still shift, and there's no promise it ever reaches a store shelf, and if it does happen, SpaceX would be walking into a crowded field.
OpenAI already has Jony Ive, Apple's old design chief, working on its own AI hardware, and just last week it brought on Paul Meade, the Apple executive who ran the Vision Pro team. Then there's the graveyard to think about. Humane's AI Pin got bricked for good after selling fewer than ten thousand units, and the Rabbit R1 kept barely five thousand active users months after its launch.
Qualcomm shares climbed about three percent on the news, proof that Wall Street likes the sound of a SpaceX gadget more than SpaceX apparently does. Musk has said for years he's got no real interest in building a phone, and honestly, this denial felt a little too tidy for a story with this much detail in it. The prototype is supposedly thinner than the iPhone sitting in your pocket right now. And SpaceX still hasn't put out one single public statement on any of it.
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