June 12, 2026
MAN AND ROBOTS: A weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work.
🤖 Elon Musk Wins First Leg of the AI Race
1. Elon Musk may have lost his battle against Sam Altman in court, but today he has officially beaten OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to launch the first major AI startup initial public offering (IPO) by offering shares in xAI via SpaceX stock. The initial price for the stock was projected to be $135 a share, ultimately valuing the company at around $1.77 trillion, with some expecting that number to reach $2 trillion in short order.
“The other aerospace companies, they build good rockets and everything. They were simply not pursuing the technology that’s necessary to make life multiplanetary. To make Star Trek. To make the exciting science futures that we’ve read about real,” said Musk on the floor of Nasdaq at the opening bell this morning. “We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars, or anywhere in the solar system, and maybe beyond the solar system at some point, we want to be able to take you there… I’m confident at this point that the incredible team that we have here will do that for you.”
For those who haven’t been keeping track, SpaceX, which is generally focused on space missions, is also the parent company of Musk’s Starlink satellite internet connectivity startup and xAI, his artificial intelligence startup, which now also controls X (formerly known as Twitter) and Grok. The IPO makes Musk the world’s first trillionaire at $1.1 trillion.
🎥 Lionsgate Bets Its Future on AI Startup
2. The experimental partnership between film studio Lionsgate and New York-based AI startup Runway that began in 2024 has now evolved into a full-fledged business venture. Lionsgate has agreed to take a non-cash equity stake in Runway for an undisclosed amount. Back in February, Runway raised $315 million as part of its Series E funding from the likes of General Atlantic, Nvidia, Adobe Ventures, AllianceBernstein, AMD Ventures, and others, valuing the company at roughly $5.3 billion.
“This is an iterative process,” said Lionsgate Vice Chairman Michael Burns, in a statement. “As we continue to expand the use cases of Runway technology across our production operations and introduce its tools to more of our filmmakers, we believe it will help our talent redefine and reshape the art of the possible in their creative endeavors.”
Implications: The initial partnership shook Hollywood a couple of years ago, as the two companies confirmed that Lionsgate would make its catalog of films available to Runway for AI training, a move that some felt could accelerate the move from live-action films to wholly AI-generated films. However, it turned out that the studio’s catalog alone wasn’t enough to train a fully contained model, but the arrangement nevertheless deepened Runway’s ability to deliver cinematic realism through its AI models.
During Runway’s AI Festival in New York this week, director Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, Solo: A Star Wars Story) told an audience what he thought the chances were that AI films and AI-generated characters might take over from human actors. “It’s going to ultimately be determined by us. What’s worth our time? What are we invested in? What values do we care about?” said Howard. “Do we care about knowing the alive actors on screen and connecting with them for that reason, or which I think won’t ever go away, but are we also fully willing to invest in characters that are synthetic? There are already CGI characters, there are already animated characters. So, I think the answer is, we don’t really know, but I expect there’s room for all of it.”
🔈 Stinging AI Rebuke from the Original Dune Harkonnen
3. “All of us are under threat from AI. We have to take that threat seriously. We need to keep our freedom. Our freedom of speech. Our freedom to think. To sing. I’m a songwriter and I’ve never heard an AI machine that’s had its heart broken. So I don’t really feel like I’m in competition [with AI], but who knows what’s down the line, we don’t. Audiences like a bit of grit, they don’t like perfection. AI can give you a polished, perfect image, or whatever, but it’s not what people like. People like to see rough edges.”
Sting, musician/actor, at the Tony Awards for his new version of The Last Ship musical
*Source: Variety
🎨 Hollywood Art Directors Hit Goodfellas Director
4. The silent war in Hollywood over who will and won’t adopt AI for filmmaking is still simmering, with the latest to choose sides being none other than Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese (The Departed, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, The Wolf of Wall Street). Last week, the legendary director affirmed his support for using AI in filmmaking via his collaboration with startup Black Forest Labs (made by the co-creators of Stable Diffusion), the maker of Flux. Now, the Art Directors Guild, the union representing artists and designers who help build the visuals for fictional worlds we see in movies and TV, has responded to Scorsese in an open letter posted earlier this week.
“Mr. Scorsese’s promotion of a generative AI product circumvents the input of Art Directors Guild Local 800 art directors, graphic artists, illustrators, production designers, scenic artists, set designers, and other talented Union professionals,” read the statement from the IATSE Local 800 branch of the Art Directors Guild, based in Los Angeles. “Generative AI is only capable of producing this type of ‘cinematic intelligence’ by ingesting large swaths of copyrighted work, likely scraped from the internet without consent, credit, compensation, or transparency.”
Fighting Trends?: That one of the most high-profile spats over AI in filmmaking would arise between one of the most period-piece-reliant and least special effects-oriented directors and the guild was unexpected and likely a sign of which direction the industry is moving. Generally, it’s no surprise to see science fiction directors like James Cameron and Joe Russo embrace AI for its VFX capabilities. But when a traditionalist like Scorsese begins to extol the virtues of AI, it sets the stage for AI being normalized throughout the industry, despite the protestations of some insiders. “To think [art directors’] professional contributions can be mimicked or outshone by generative AI,” the Guild’s statement continued, “which is built on work likely stolen from them and many other artists from around the world, is a betrayal of the collaborative nature of cinema.”✍︎
MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.
Cover image: Elon Musk at Nasdaq via CNBC-TV18 via YouTube
