SpaceX shares for US children: Musk pledge, Super Micro AI

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Wednesday October twenty-one, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: Elon Musk promises SpaceX shares to every American child, Super Micro's revenue explodes on the AI server boom, a Chinese AI tool linked to a wave of cyberattacks in Japan, chipmaker Micron on what memory it takes to power the next wave of AI, and to close out, two things you can actually use today: the free photo organiser Mylio Photos, and the open-source privacy keyboard FlorisBoard. Let's start with Musk.

Elon Musk pledges one SpaceX share to every American child in a ten billion dollar gesture.

Samantha: Elon Musk said he plans to give one share of SpaceX stock to every child in the United States next year. With roughly seventy-two million children under eighteen, that works out to around ten and a half billion dollars at current internal valuations. The announcement came just hours after AI company Anthropic committed five percent of its shares to a public welfare fund, so there's clearly a mood right now among the top US tech names to signal some form of wealth sharing.

Bob: And the timing is not accidental. These pledges are landing while Washington is actively debating a wealth tax on billionaires and while public anger about AI-driven job losses is rising. Handing out one share per child is also a very carefully designed gesture: it is huge in headline value, but SpaceX is privately held, which means those shares cannot simply be sold on a stock exchange tomorrow. Families would be sitting on paper wealth tied to whatever liquidity windows SpaceX chooses to open. So symbolically enormous, practically much more complicated.

Samantha: There's also the question of what this means for valuation discipline. SpaceX's valuation has been driven by Starlink's cash flow and expectations around Starship. Pledging more than ten billion in equity is a reminder of how comfortable the company has become at those levels. Compare that to Anthropic's five percent public welfare commitment, which is a very different structure, run through a foundation with explicit charitable goals. Musk's version is more direct, more personal, and much harder to govern.

Bob: For European listeners the interesting question is whether this travels. Europe does not have founders sitting on this kind of private equity pile outside of a handful of names, and the regulatory culture around share transfers to minors is tighter. You can imagine ASML or SAP shareholders politely declining to follow this template. But the broader conversation about tech wealth and public legitimacy is very much alive here too, from the Dutch excess profit debate to French discussions about taxing unrealised gains. Musk has just raised the bar on what a tech founder can do unilaterally with their own shareholding.

Samantha: The bottom line is this is a political act dressed as philanthropy. Whether American families ever see real money from it depends entirely on when, and whether, SpaceX goes public, and on what strings get attached between now and next year.

Super Micro forecasts a huge revenue jump as hyperscalers pour money into AI servers.

Bob: Super Micro Computer told investors it expects first-quarter revenue of between eighteen and a half and nineteen and a half billion dollars, well above what analysts had pencilled in and above its own earlier guidance. The driver is simple: relentless demand for AI servers from the big cloud providers. Microsoft, Google and Amazon are collectively projected to spend over seven hundred billion dollars on AI infrastructure this year, and Super Micro is one of the companies physically building the racks that house those accelerators.

Samantha: What makes this interesting is not just the top line but the margin story. Super Micro flagged higher gross margins thanks to a more favourable customer and product mix, which suggests they are winning more of the premium liquid-cooled, high-density configurations rather than commodity boxes. That matters because for a long time the knock on Super Micro was that it competed on price. If they can hold stronger margins while scaling this fast, the whole AI hardware supply chain gets re-rated.

Bob: And this is where the European angle sharpens. European cloud operators and sovereign AI projects, from the French Mistral-aligned infrastructure to the German AI gigafactory plans, all depend on exactly this kind of server supply. If demand from the US hyperscalers keeps absorbing Super Micro's capacity, European buyers either pay more, wait longer, or settle for less optimal configurations. That is a quiet but real constraint on how fast Europe can build out its own AI stack.

Samantha: There is also the counterweight question. These numbers only work as long as the hyperscalers keep spending, and we are starting to hear more investor voices asking when AI revenue will catch up with AI capex. For now the answer from Super Micro is: not our problem, we just keep shipping. But a single quarter of cautious guidance from Microsoft or Amazon would ripple straight back into this forecast.

Bob: Key takeaway: the AI build-out is still accelerating on the hardware side, and European buyers are at the back of a very long queue.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

Chinese AI tool ARTEX linked to a wave of cyberattacks on dozens of Japanese companies.

Bob: GMO Internet Group's security arm in Japan has confirmed that a Chinese-made AI cybersecurity tool called ARTEX was used in a recent string of attacks against Japanese businesses. The affected organisations range from restaurant chains to car hire operators, and the breaches may have exposed millions of customer records. The notable part is not just the scale, but the fact that investigators have been able to point at a specific AI-driven tool as a common thread across the incidents.

Samantha: ARTEX was originally positioned as a defensive product, something security teams would use to probe their own networks. What appears to have happened is the classic dual-use problem: a tool built to simulate attacks becomes extremely useful for actually launching them, especially when AI accelerates the reconnaissance and the exploitation steps. Automated breach-and-attack simulation platforms are not new, but adding generative AI on top compresses the time from scanning a network to finding a usable weakness from days to minutes.

Bob: For Europe this is a flashing warning light. The EU's NIS2 directive has just finished its first full year of enforcement, and most companies in scope are still catching up on basic hygiene, let alone defending against AI-accelerated intrusions. The attacks in Japan suggest that any mid-sized business with a customer database is now a realistic target, not just banks and critical infrastructure. Hotels, retailers, logistics firms: all exactly the profile that was hit.

Samantha: There is also a geopolitical layer. The confirmation that a Chinese-origin tool is tied to attacks on Japanese companies will feed directly into the ongoing debate in Brussels about restricting Chinese cybersecurity software in sensitive sectors. Expect procurement teams across Europe to start adding ARTEX-adjacent tools to their internal watchlists this week, even without any formal guidance from ENISA.

Bob: Bottom line: AI is making offensive security cheaper and faster, and the defensive side has not yet caught up.

Micron sets out the memory roadmap it says Europe will need to compete in the next phase of AI.

Samantha: Micron Technology is hosting a technology webinar today walking through its roadmap for the memory and storage that modern AI systems depend on. Scott DeBoer, Micron's president and chief technology and products officer, is set to detail how the company plans to extend its lead in the high-bandwidth memory used inside AI accelerators, alongside its DRAM and NAND lines. The pitch is that moving data in and out of chips is now the real bottleneck for large AI systems, not raw compute.

Bob: And this is squarely a non-AI-model story, it is about the physical plumbing. High-bandwidth memory stacks sit right next to AI accelerators and feed them data at enormous speed. Supply of this specific memory has been tight for over a year, with Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron essentially splitting the global market. Any shift in capacity or roadmap at one of those three vendors directly shapes what every AI data centre operator in the world can build next.

Samantha: For European data centre operators the practical issue is allocation. If Micron and its rivals keep prioritising US hyperscalers, European sovereign AI projects face the same constraint we talked about with Super Micro: either pay a premium, wait, or scale down ambitions. A clear long-term roadmap at least lets European buyers plan procurement cycles more realistically instead of chasing short-term shortages.

Bob: There's also an industrial policy dimension. The European Chips Act has focused heavily on logic manufacturing, but memory has been treated almost as an afterthought. Today's webinar is a reminder that if Europe wants its own AI infrastructure, memory supply has to sit on the agenda too, not just lithography machines from ASML and foundries in Dresden.

Samantha: What this shows is that the AI race is increasingly a race about memory bandwidth, and Europe does not currently have a seat at the table where that gets decided.

The free photo manager Mylio Photos finally brings your scattered pictures home without a cloud subscription.

Bob: To close out, two things you can actually use today. First up is Mylio Photos, a free photo organiser that pulls together images from your phone, laptop, external drives and old memory cards into one searchable library, without pushing everything into a big cloud. It runs on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, and the sync between your own devices happens directly over your home network rather than through a company server.

Samantha: The appeal here is very practical. Many people have twenty years of family photos sitting across three different accounts, an old hard drive, a backup disk that nobody wants to touch, and the camera roll on the current phone. Mylio Photos indexes all of that, de-duplicates, and lets you search by face, location or date. Reviewers highlight that it does not require you to upload originals anywhere, which is the main reason it keeps showing up on European privacy-focused recommendation lists.

Bob: There is a free tier that covers the basics for one device, and paid tiers if you want more devices and automatic sync between them. For a lot of listeners the free version is enough just to get a proper inventory of what photos they actually have and where. The install takes about ten minutes, and the first full scan of a big library may run overnight.

Samantha: Worth noting: Mylio has been around for years, so it is not a brand-new launch. What has changed is that the free tier recently became more generous and the mobile apps have been rebuilt. If you tried it two or three years ago and bounced off the interface, it is worth another look. The core promise is simple: your photos stay on your devices, you stay in control.

Bob: One concrete suggestion: start by pointing it only at your phone and one folder on your laptop. Do not throw the whole archive at it on day one. Once you trust how it handles duplicates and folders, widen the net.

Samantha: It is a quiet, patient tool, which is exactly what the photo problem needs.

FlorisBoard is the open-source Android keyboard that keeps your typing off the big companies' servers.

Bob: Our second pick is FlorisBoard, a free open-source keyboard for Android. It replaces Gboard or Samsung Keyboard with something that works entirely on your own device, with no account, no cloud dictionary, and no telemetry sent back to a parent company. For anyone who has been quietly uncomfortable about every word they type passing through Google's or Samsung's prediction systems, this is a very low-friction alternative.

Samantha: FlorisBoard supports multiple languages, swipe typing, emoji, clipboard history and themes, so you are not giving up the basics to get privacy. The project is community-run, hosted on open repositories, and gets regular updates. It is still officially a beta, which the developers are upfront about, but many users report it as stable enough for daily use on their main phone.

Bob: The install is straightforward through F-Droid, the open-source Android app store, or through the Play Store. After installation you enable it in Android's keyboard settings and set it as default. The whole process takes maybe five minutes. There is no sign-up, no email, no linked account.

Samantha: Why bring this up today? Because the Japan cyberattack story earlier is a reminder that the attack surface in modern tech is huge, and your keyboard is one of the most intimate parts of it. Every password, every message, every search query passes through it. Choosing a keyboard that does not phone home is one of the simplest privacy upgrades a European Android user can make this week.

Bob: It also fits the broader European mood around digital sovereignty: fewer defaults from a handful of US firms, more small, accountable, open-source tools. FlorisBoard is not going to change the world, but it changes something you use thousands of times a day.

Bob: Today we covered: Elon Musk's SpaceX share pledge to American children, Super Micro's booming AI server forecast, the Chinese ARTEX tool linked to cyberattacks in Japan, Micron's memory roadmap for the next wave of AI, and two things to try yourself: Mylio Photos and FlorisBoard.

Samantha: It is. Today we covered: Elon Musk's pledge of SpaceX shares to every American child, Super Micro's surging AI server revenue, the Chinese AI tool ARTEX tied to attacks on Japanese firms, Micron's memory roadmap for next-generation AI, and two things to try yourself: the photo organiser Mylio Photos and the private Android keyboard FlorisBoard.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.