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Apple TV’s show and Elon Musk’s Boring Co. share suspiciously similar logo design

The Boring Company's latest innovations on display in test ride video. | Image: Steve Jurvetson/YouTube

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Elon Musk can be credited for inspiring several industries, but The Boring Company’s graphic design is perhaps a bit surprising as a candidate, especially when the inspired company is well known for its graphics-focused hardware, software, and product packaging.

Apple TV+ has a new series coming this fall that stars some top talent, but the production’s logo doesn’t look so new. It’s titled “The Morning Show,” and it looks like Boring’s giant black dot in its name design found its way into Apple’s new show logo. The layout of the show’s logo is also the same as Boring’s logo.

https://twitter.com/brentcas/status/1160952287860264964?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

(Image: Apple TV+)
(Image: The Boring Company)

Perhaps minimalism is the culprit. After all, The Boring Company has a simple design that was created even quicker than the digging venture itself manifested from a tweet, and Apple is big on minimalism even at the expense of headphone jacks. Or perhaps both companies used the same logo generator or logo bidding company. Obviously, it’s not clear what happened, and just as unclear is how Apple TV+ would green light a logo that is so strikingly similar to a prominent logo for a company that’s not exactly underground in terms of social media presence.

Trademarks have their own legal conditions, of course, which might give Apple all the room it needs to use their logo no matter how much it looks like The Boring Company’s logo. They’re in different classes of goods, meaning their customer bases are separate and therefore shouldn’t cause confusion, more or less. The Morning Show logo was filed for audio and video recordings, broadcasting, and ongoing TV drama series as well as related entertainment services. The Boring Company’s logo was filed for research, development, design, testing, and consulting services in the field of high speed transportation of passengers and goods.

The Boring Company’s logo is on all matters of merchandise and equipment.

Notably, neither entity has a registered trademark yet, although The Boring Company’s word mark should be registered soon and the graphic mark should be ready for registration soon, according to records at the US Patent and Trademark Office. The Morning Show’s trademark, on the other hand, has encountered an Examiner that thinks it’s too descriptive of a mark for registration. The trademark application filed is also just for the words, not the graphic logo that’s being used in the show. It’s all pretty boring legalese, but the overall similarities between the two projects is interesting overall.

Unless Boring is planning on starting some sort of reality series soon, the two companies will probably only ever share a big dot in common. The Morning Show doesn’t sound like anything related to transportation or heavy machinery, either. That is, unless the characters ironically cover a Boring Company news story for some reason.

“The news is only half the story. The Morning Show stars Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon, Emmy winner Jennifer Aniston and Golden Globe winner Steve Carell in a high-stakes drama that pulls back the curtain on the morning news,” the show’s summary reads on Apple TV’s YouTube channel.

Regardless of what happened or what will happen with the marks, we’ve all learned that big dots are all the rage apparently.

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If you’re curious, you can watch The Morning Show’s trailer below:

Accidental computer geek, fascinated by most history and the multiplanetary future on its way. Quite keen on the democratization of space. | It's pronounced day-sha, but I answer to almost any variation thereof.

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Elon Musk

SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff

Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.

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Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.

The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.

Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.

Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry

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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.

The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.

Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors: Morgan Stanley

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Credit: Tesla

In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.

Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.

Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue

Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.

The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”

Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”

Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”

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Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.

Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.

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Investor's Corner

SpaceX AI investment gamble will make it a big winner, firm says

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Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX’s massive investment in AI will make it a big winner, Argus Research said after the company’s successful earnings call last week.

The firm also upgraded shares to a Buy from Hold and set a $160 price target.

SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) is currently recovering from its heavy AI infrastructure investments, as it spent nearly $16 billion in Q2 alone. The company did this primarily by monetizing high-demand GPU compute capacity at a much faster pace than traditional data center economics would suggest.

Company CFO Bret Johnsen said that SpaceX would be able to pay back anything on new deployments within a year.

There are plenty of ways the company can do this:

Leasing excess compute capacity through contracts

SpaceX has already built Colossus and Colossus II, largely for its own model training. However, much of that capacity is already rented out to third parties. It already has major deals with Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI. These partnerships are adding billions per month to SpaceX’s spreadsheet.

SpaceX is charging Anthropic massive money for its compute

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High utilization driven by industry-wide scarcity

The demand for advanced AI training and inference capacity continues to exceed what is available for use. SpaceX can fill new racks quickly after they come online, so the capital deployed converts into revenue with minimal idle time.

Additionally, management and outside observers have described the new compute capital as behaving more like a cost-of-goods-sold than traditional multi-year capex, especially because of this rapid monetization pattern.

Capacity has already scaled from ~0.4 GW a year to 1.4 GW annually by the end of Q2. There are targets of more than 2 GW by year-end.

High incremental margins on the rental business once capacity is online

GPU cloud providers often operate at strong gross margins. SpaceX can monetize capacity that was already partially built or can be added efficiently. This means that incremental EBITDA margins on the rental revenue are usually high. This accelerates cash recovery relative to the gross capital outlay.

Parallel monetization of its own AI software and applications

Beyond pure infrastructure rental, SpaceX also generates revenue from Grok through subscriptions and usage, from X through ads, data, and other related services, enterprise APIs, and the planned integration of the Cursor coding tools acquisition.

These application layers ride on the same compute infrastructure and provide additional high-margin streams that could offset build-out costs. AI-segment revenue overall rose sharply to about $2.6 billion in Q2, according to Motley Fool. This was driven primarily by the infrastructure contracts, but the software side is also partially responsible.

Efficient, large-scale deployment and vertical integration advantages

SpaceX has emphasized the rapid construction of power and cooling infrastructure and favorable cost-per-megawatt economics relative to industry benchmarks in some disclosures.

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Combined with its ability to scale capacity aggressively and the fact that many contracts start generating revenue within months of capacity coming online, the effective payback compresses dramatically compared with more conventional multi-year data-center projects.

SpaceX’s dominant near-term recovery path will turn the AI clusters into a hyperscale-style compute rental business for other leading AI companies while still using a portion for internal models.

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