SPACE X IPO

Major Trump funder's company now a 'trainwreck'


Nick Hilden

May 26, 2026

ALTERNET

Last week, Elon Musk’s SpaceX released its IPO prospectus in preparation for going public in June, and now that experts have had a chance to pore through its 277 pages, one analyst has bad news for interested investors: the company is a “trainwreck.”

This is according to Ed Elson, a prominent financial and tech analyst who is particularly well known among Gen-Z, who posted on Tuesday, “I read all 277 pages of SpaceX's IPO filing so you don't have to.” His nutshell assessment was not optimistic: “Losses up 700 percent. Revenue decelerating. 107x price-to-sales multiple. It's a trainwreck.” When you dig into its claims, he says, it’s “unserious, empty, hallucinatory, and borderline dishonest.”

Elson says that the fantastical elements of the filing are clear from the start.


“After eighteen images of rockets in space, we learn that the company’s mission is ‘to extend the light of consciousness to the stars,’” writes Elson. “To accomplish this, the company plans to advance humanity ‘to Kardashev Type II status,’ which is defined in the document as ‘a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of its local star.’ Only a few pages in and it’s already starting to feel like an ayahuasca trip.”

This “psychedelic language,” notes Elson, is peppered throughout the pitch, with “The light of consciousness” mentioned ten different times, “human augmentation” mentioned eleven times, and “first principles” twenty-seven times. “AI gets a mind-boggling 1,251 mentions — more features than the word ‘Jesus’ gets in the Bible.”


“Once you arrive at the financials,” he says, “you start to realize what the language is overcompensating for: awful numbers. The company generated $4.7 billion in Q1 2026, up only 15 percent from the year before (very low for an ‘AI company’). It also lost $4.3 billion, up 700 percent from the year before. That means the company is spending roughly twice as much as it makes (and on pace to explode those losses even more), while growing its topline six times slower than Nvidia and two times slower than my own podcast. There’s no getting around it — these numbers are terrible.”

The numbers look even worse when you compare them to 2025. The company’s revenue grew by 33 percent last year, meaning its business is actually decelerating.

“Meanwhile,” notes Elson, “net losses came in at $4.9 billion, so the company is on track to lose four times more money than it did last year. I’ll put it simply: slowing revenue + skyrocketing expenses = not good.”


All of this is even more farcical in the context of the company’s $2 trillion valuation, which Elson says does not reflect the actual financials. The stock will be priced at 107 times sales, making it one of the most expensive ever. As Elson notes, “It will be twice as valuable than Walmart while generating less revenue than Macy’s,” and when compared against other tech megacompanies that went public, the SpaceX valuation is “insane.” As Elson explains, “Meta went public at 28 times sales with 88 percent revenue growth. Google went public at 10 times sales with 234 percent growth. Put another way, SpaceX is growing seven times slower while asking for a multiple ten times higher.”

According to Elson, a closer analysis of the company’s actual position places its valuation closer to $500 billion. Still a lot, but still 75 percent less than the suggested number.

Other experts have raised their own concerns about the company’s IPO. According to the New York Times, SpaceX appears to be structured in a way that favors owner Elon Musk “at the expense of other shareholders.” And Barron’s warns that stock shoppers should invest at their “own risk,” noting that these types of high-profile IPOs tend to “underperform” and deliver "volatility" resulting in “negative returns."

Musk — who donated at $288 million to elect President Donald Trump — has faced accusations that his appointment as a “special government employee” at the head of DOGE allowed him to act with conflicts of interest regarding SpaceX’s government contracts. Government watchdogs note that since taking office, more and more of NASA’s funding has been diverted to Musk’s company.

Now, Musk is inviting the public to buy into that company, which Elson warns is more fantasy than business.

“The only way to get yourself mentally to $2 trillion is to believe that every possible sci-fi objective will be achieved, from data centers in space to asteroid mining to building cities on Mars,” he concludes. “Once you’ve done that, you then have to convince yourself that each of those endeavors will also make money. There’s optimism, and then there’s delusion.”

Wall Street Says That a Company That Loses Billions is Worth Trillions

Dean Baker

 May 26, 2026

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Photograph Source: Alexander Hatley – CC BY 2.0

On Wednesday, the Washington Post ran a short piece with the headline, “Musk’s SpaceX Discloses Massive Losses Ahead of Expected Record-Breaking IPO.” The first sentence told readers:

SpaceX, the rocket company led by Elon Musk set to debut on the stock market in coming weeks, has recorded $13 billion worth of losses since the beginning of 2023, according to a financial filing made public Wednesday by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Later in the article, we learn that the implied market capitalization, based on the SpaceX IPO, is $1 trillion. Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but when I learned economics, a stock’s price was supposed to be related to its profits. A company that loses $13 billion would not ordinarily warrant a market capitalization in the trillions.

Of course, this is the same story with Musk’s other big company, Tesla. It has a market capitalization of almost $1.6 trillion, nearly 400 times its $4 billion earnings. I suppose its stock price is a bet on Tesla’s earnings growth, but that doesn’t seem very promising with the company rapidly losing market share to Chinese competitors.

Furthermore, almost 80 percent of the earnings Tesla does have is coming from carbon credits it gets as part of what his friend Donald Trump calls “the green scam.” Tesla’s money train, even at 1/400th of its share price, may not be long-lived if Trump gets his say, so its profit growth looks to be headed in the wrong direction.

But Musk gave us a bit more guidance in the registration statement for SpaceX’s IPO. According to the WaPo article:

In its registration statement, SpaceX estimated its total addressable market — the ceiling for its business ambitions — at $28.5 trillion, an amount nearly equal to the gross domestic product of the United States.

All but $2 trillion of that opportunity comes from AI services, SpaceX’s filing said.

This means Musk is betting on getting a substantial portion of a $27 trillion annual market, 90 percent of current US GDP from his AI.

Since Musk provides no time-horizon for this projection, it’s not clear whether this is projected as an annual figure at some future point, 10, 20, or 30 years out, or perhaps even a cumulative total over this indeterminate time period. But hey, we’re just talking about a trillion-dollar stock valuation, why nickel and dime the projections?

When it comes to big boasts on future AI sales, it is probably worth noting that Musk and his Silicon Valley buddies don’t appear to be doing so well today. Chinese AI makers are beating them in sales in the rest of the world and seem to be gaining ground even in Silicon Valley.

Apparently, Airbnb is going with Chinese AI over the domestically produced stuff. The US stuff sells for five to ten times as much as what the Chinese producers charge. It’s like having the option of buying a car for $4,000 rather than $40,000. You need a pretty good story to get people to go with the $40,000 car. The market (the AI buyers’ market, not the stock market) doesn’t seem to think the Silicon Valley boys have the story.

Anyhow, it seems pretty clear that the valuation of SpaceX is really nothing more than a vote of confidence that Elon Musk will turn it into an incredibly profitable company at some time in the not-too- distant future, or at least a bet that other investors will believe that Elon Musk will turn it into an incredibly profitable company at some time in the not-too-distant future.

I have not followed Musk’s business career closely but Grok did tell me that in 2015 he promised Tesla would have full self-driving cars in two years. I did pay more attention to what Musk said about politics and government finances, especially around the time he was running DOGE. And here I can say with great confidence that Musk was not just a little bit wrong; the things he was saying were batshit crazy.

Musk repeatedly claimed that there was at least $2 trillion in waste in the federal government budget. This would put the amount of waste at more than a quarter of the budget. Since almost three-quarters of the $7 trillion budget goes to Social Security, Medicare, the military, and interest on the debt — programs Musk’s boss said he didn’t want to touch — it was pretty hard to claim there was $2 trillion in waste.

But these numbers did not stop Elon Musk. He suggested that he might give us all a $5,000 DOGE dividend check, a sum that would come to $1.3 trillion if it went to every adult in the country. Oh yeah, he also said that DOGE could balance the budget, eliminating a $1.7 trillion deficit.

Musk made other absurd claims. He said there were 20 million dead people getting Social Security checks, apparently misunderstanding the program’s procedures. Perhaps even more disturbing, even when people who understood the program explained Musk’s mistake, he never corrected himself.

Returning to SpaceX’s IPO, we’re looking at a company that loses billions of dollars. It is run entirely by a person who routinely makes promises that he can’t make good on and says things about the world that are totally crazy. That doesn’t sound like a trillion-dollar company to me, but what do I know about business?

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

Is There a Future Without Incarceration? Abolitionist Art Shows Us One.

Prison abolitionist art creates a future to briefly live in, and from that place, turn and look at our present.

By Nicholas Powers , 

Truthout

May 23, 2026

Still from Space to Breathe.

I banged my head on the bars. It was 2:00 am. I was in a Brooklyn jail. Under the fluorescent light, other men slept on the bench. Each one of us was arrested for so-called quality-of-life crimes like drinking a beer on a stoop, blasting a radio, or being unhoused. I shook the bars again. The walls closed in on me. I had a hard time breathing.

When I got out the next day, neighbors told me their lockdown stories. In many cities around the U.S., going to jail is a rite of passage. So many generations of us, men of color, have cycled through prison. It shaped how we see our future. I didn’t want that to be my future, or my son’s future.

I spent a short time in jail, but many of my neighbors spent years behind bars. Every day, more and more people are being arrested. Now the Trump administration is expanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jails, and more are threatened with imprisonment as the administration labels left-wing groups and individuals “domestic terrorists.” Add to this the use of artificial intelligence to enhance state and corporate surveillance, and we face a future of the U.S. becoming a totalitarian carceral state.

Is a world without prisons possible?

It is, but it begins in the artistic imagination. We see, listen and read art, but rarely learn about art that challenges the powerful. Yet, overlooked by critics is prison abolitionist art. It literally spans centuries. You see it in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from 380 B.C. and in the 2025 Afrofuturist film Space to Breathe. Prison abolitionist art has three major themes: using prison as a metaphor for society; showing how the mind escapes metaphorical prisons; and, finally, imagining a world without mass incarceration.

Interview |
Robin D. G. Kelley: It’s Not Enough to Abolish ICE — We Have to Abolish Police
“What’s happening now has happened before,” Kelley said, underscoring the anti-Blackness foundational to US fascism. By George Yancy , Truthout February 26, 2026

A strong, popular social movement can fight it. We need a vision to guide it. Prison abolitionist art shows the way.

A Nation Behind Bars

“Land of the free and home of the brave,” the crowd sings. When I go to sports events, people with a beer buzzed from beer sing the national anthem. When the last note is sung, the stadium erupts in cheers. Yet I don’t join. Underneath the patriotism is a bleaker reality: for many, the U.S. is a prison.

The U.S. is the independent democracy with the highest incarceration rate in the world. The U.S. has roughly 342 million people; according to the Prison Policy Initiative, 2 million are jailed at any given time. When you read that number, it is important to know two things. First, mass incarceration is a pyramid of federal and state prisons as well as immigration jails. Add local and juvenile jails. Add CIA foreign black sites and overseas ICE jails. The U.S. prison system is like one of those face-hugger parasites from the movie Alien, feeding off the host. Each year, 10.5 million people are arrested, or one every three seconds.

Second is that prison is larger than the physical cell. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly 650,000 people are released from prison each year, but “two-thirds will likely be arrested in three years.” Why this revolving door? Well, of the 19 million people convicted of a felony and the 79 million who have a criminal record, re-entry into life is a gauntlet of obstacles. The Sentencing Project paints a vivid portrait of post-prison life: Very few rehabilitation programs. Minimal financial resources. Employees often don’t hire people convicted of felonies. Landlords discriminate. Some people convicted of felonies can’t vote or get public housing. They face stigma and isolation. They become an invisible underclass.

Put two and two together and what becomes clear is that mass incarceration is a factory that transforms millions of people a day into permanent prisoners. Even when it spits them out and they are technically “freed,” they face poverty, depression, and stigma that drives them right back into jail — which, by the way, costs $445 billion a year. Whole generations of people are destroyed so money can be made.

Many of us feel rage at being jailed. The anger is stuffed down until you take your child to a playground in a bright afternoon. You can’t help but worry which one will be caught by that system. Who is going to get jailed later in life? You hate that you even have to think about it. But you do. And you hold your child even tighter.

Prison Society

Is there a way out? Yes, but the first step is using prison as a kind of prism to analyze society itself. Incarcerated artists created, and continue to create, a canon spanning literature, cinema, and music that does exactly that. Through their art you grasp “jail” as something more than a physical building; it can be the structure of a whole society.

You probably were taught in school about “the canon,” or works of art that one must know to be considered “literate.” Maybe they were of exceptional quality. Maybe they helped define a people. Think Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” or Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The prison art canon is work by incarcerated artists who explore civil corruption and self-transformation. Prison literature specifically began as fragmentary scenes in other books like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in his book The Republic. The canon really gets going in The Consolation of Philosophy, written in 523 A.D. by the philosopher Boethius, the original prisoner-author, while he was unjustly jailed before his execution in 524. Others followed, like Thomas Usk in the 14th century, who wrote The Testament of Love, or George Ashby’s A Prisoner’s Reflections, written in the 15th century. The European tradition of prison literature hit a high point in the 18th century with Marquis de Sade’s sexual mysticism composed in jail.

In the U.S., the tradition of European prison literature morphed into prison abolitionist art. It went beyond merely describing jail or civic corruption to placing self-transformation as the first step to social change. It imagined a world beyond prisons. The first book in this genre was Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative. No, he was not held in a modern jail, but he analyzed slavery as an open-air prison. Slavery, like modern prison, held people captive. It stripped one’s identity. It used violence to force obedience. It taught enslaved people to obey rules to gain easier work. After Douglass escaped and became a famous orator, he was in Washington, D.C., surrounded by powerful politicians. He bitterly realized free whites acted like slaves. They faced poverty and punishment. They lied to get favors. Society was just an open-air plantation. He wrote, “The same traits of character seen in slaves, are seen in the slaves of political parties.”

More than a century after Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” again used the prison metaphor to describe life under racial segregation. He wrote of the open-air prison of segregation, “when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next.” A supposedly free society was like a large jail.

You see the prison metaphor 136 years after Douglass in the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre, in which the protagonist Andre says to his friend Wallace that modern life is “…the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built — they’ve built their own prison.”

The prison metaphor, or seeing the U.S. through the prism of the prison, is a common theme. You see it in films like the Matrix and Hunger Games trilogies. You see it in books like George Jackson’s 1972 Blood in My Eye or Assata Shakur’s self-titled 1987 autobiography, Assata. You see it in new works like Jean Trounstine’s 2026 novel, Sounds Like Trouble to Me, in which a former prison guard murders her abusive husband. When she is jailed, she faces the same brutality that she once dished out.

The Illusion of Freedom

Within prison abolitionist art is a shocking contradiction: Freedom is found in confinement. The isolated mind is cut from attachments. In that isolation, one sees through illusions like consumerism, job status, or patriotism. In Boethius’s The Consolations of Philosophy, he writes, “…human souls are free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.” The scene of a prisoner-artist freed from illusion appears through centuries. Nearly 1,500 years later, Malcolm X described in his autobiography the power of learning in prison: “I knew right there in prison that reading had changed my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside of me some dormant desire to mentally alive.”

In prison abolitionist art, two essential themes appear. The first is to use prison as a lens to analyze society. The second, to show how isolation can be subverted as tool of oppression and used to free the mind from the illusions of freedom that exist beyond bars. What sets the genre of prison abolition art apart from prison art is that the former imagines a future free of incarceration.

Until Everybody’s Free

The world is at the crossroads. On one side, we see signs of mass AI-driven unemployment, coupled with an AI-driven police state. It is a dystopic future: Millions of people warehoused in prisons, guarded by robots. On the other hand, we hear calls for universal health care, moratoriums on data centers, care instead of cops, and as one book title says, a Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

What prison abolitionist art does is provide a vision of a future with no jails. Maybe that’s why science fiction takes the lead. Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed portrays two planets, one capitalist, named Urras, the other an anarchist commune, named Anarres. Its citizens, called the Annaresti, do not use prisons but severe social shaming. Another sci-fi franchise that imagines a future with very little use for prisons is “Star Trek.” Aside from a few villains, you don’t see anyone in jail. In a classic “Next Generation” episode, Picard tells a man who was frozen that in the 24th century, there is no scarcity. He said, “A lot has changed in the past 300 years. We are no longer obsessed with accumulation of things. We eliminated hunger, want and the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

Prison abolitionist art creates a future to briefly live in, and from that place, turn and look at our present. We can ask questions, again. We can hope, too. Recently, I had friends over to binge-watch shows with a prison abolitionist theme. Of course, “Star Trek” episodes were played, but we ended with Space to Breathe, directed by Juicebox P. Burton. It is a sci-fi short film that is campy, Afrofuturist, yet sincere. It portrayed three Black youth in a future with no prisons, looking back at the revolution that ended in Abolition Day, the day when the dismantling of mass incarceration began in this fictional history. Burton told Truthout, “We made this film as a gift to organizers, to help them imagine a different world. To show that their hard work today is building a more, free future.” The movie is showing at Reclamation Day in Brooklyn on June 20th, and activists already are talking about it.

I was lucky to have a link to preview it and showed it to a few friends. As we watched, we were deeply moved by the use of real people, talking in a circle about restorative justice, and footage of former prisoners released and hugged by family. One elder with thick glasses said, “Take the money that’s going for jail and put it into Black community for services like health care and jobs, so people can live.”

Space to Breathe did not have the big budget of “Star Trek.” But seeing Black people in the next century, living in a world we could only dream of, deeply touched us. After it ended, we sat imagining who our children’s children could be. They were radiant. They were free. The room was quiet — so quiet that for a moment, you could hear the future.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Nicholas Powers
Nicholas Powers is the author of Thirst, a political vampire novel; The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street; and most recently, Black Psychedelic Revolution. He has been writing for Truthout since 2011. His article, “Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life” in the Truthout anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? coalesces his years of reporting on police brutality.

 

With AUKUS Risks and Aging Fleet, Australia Eyes Japanese Subs as Backup

Collins-class submarine HMAS Rankin: Yuri Ramsey/Department of Defence.

Published May 21, 2026 3:32 PM by The Strategist

 

[By Richard Gray]

The reduced Collins-class submarine Life-of-Type Extension (LOTE) program, announced on 19 May, will cost more than previously expected and deliver less capability. The government’s decision to cut back the scope of the work also increases the risk to Australia’s possession of a modern, crewed submarine capability in the next decade.

AUKUS remains the best partnership for Australia to acquire the nuclear-propelled submarines necessary for Australia to manage the most dangerous era since World War II. But the now elevated risk of losing adequate conventional submarine capability in the meantime strengthens the case for preparing a Japanese fallback option.

Canberra should approach Tokyo to see how it could buy or lease Japanese submarines should they be required in the 2030s.

The Collins-class LOTE program as originally planned was always highly risky, so cutting back what will be done to the six submarines to keep them going is an understandable and responsible move. Instead of a more extensive LOTE, equipment on the submarines will be repaired and replaced as judged necessary for each boat. Sensors and weapons will be replaced where possible. The focus will be on maintenance and safety rather than enhanced capability. Replacement of the diesel engines and generators will be done only if judged to be critical.

The cost of the reduced LOTE is estimated at around A$11 billion, double what had been estimated for the full LOTE. This is likely not just because the previous costs were probably greatly underestimated but also because old equipment on the submarines will be increasingly expensive to maintain. Critical elements such as the hulls and in some cases the propulsion systems will be approaching or possibly exceeding 40 years of service by the end of the next decade, increasing the risks to safety and likely requiring intensive monitoring and maintenance.

This raises the question of value for money. Even if all goes according to the new plan, Australia will pay around A$1.8 billion per boat to keep roughly its current level of conventional submarine capability, at best. In all capability aspects this does not compare favourably with new, modern conventional submarines. For example, Japan’s Taigei?class submarines cost about A$600 million to A$700 million each. If further reductions to the scope of the LOTE occur – and the announcement yesterday leaves this prospect open, pending further engineering studies – a future government might decide that the running cost of an increasingly fragile and shrinking capability is not worth it and cut its losses. This could mean rapid retirement of older Collins-class vessels and even deciding not to extend the lives of some units, leaving a smaller and rapidly ageing submarine force until the arrival of nuclear boats.

The government plans that at any time three Collinses will be in deep maintenance, which will include life-extension work. Two of the remaining three are to be available for operations. Even assuming this can be achieved in what’s still likely to be a risky and technically challenging program, the life-extended submarines will possibly be less stealthy and probably have less endurance than previously planned. They will progressively fall behind newer regional competitors and probably be less able to undertake the full suite of required missions.

The reduction in planned submarine capability as a result of the de-scoped LOTE program increases the importance of achieving the remaining two key steps of the AUKUS Optimal Pathway, delivery to the Royal Australian Navy of US Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) and local construction of the follow-on Anglo-Australian SSN-AUKUS class.

The Virginias are due to arrive in the early 2030s, almost certainly not before 2032. But there is a significant risk that deliveries could be delayed – or even withheld if the US judges that it has too few SSNs for its own requirements. Since the Collins class is losing its competitiveness with age, delays to the Virginias and SSN-AUKUS could leave Australia without a modern crewed submarine capability for a decade or more – hence the need to get ready now for the Japanese fallback option.

As the ASPI report Hedging our Bets recommends, it is more than prudent to prepare now for the future contingency of rapidly buying or leasing conventional submarines from Japan (or even another partner) should these risks to Australia’s submarine capability emerge. The reduction in the LOTE program and resulting reduction in planned capability is a clear reminder that such risks are very real.

Richard Gray is a resident senior fellow at ASPI.

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.

Australia ‘disappointed’ by Chinese owner’s resistance to forced port sale


By AFP
May 21, 2026


Private Chinese company Landbridge acquired a 99 year lease to Darwin Port in 2015, prompting criticism of Australia from then-US President Barack Obama 

- Copyright AFP Jung Yeon-je

Australia’s defence minister Richard Marles said Thursday that Canberra was “disappointed” the Chinese leaseholder of the strategic Darwin Port was challenging efforts to return it to local ownership.

Private Chinese company Landbridge acquired a 99 year lease to Darwin Port in 2015, prompting criticism of Australia from then-US president Barack Obama.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pledged last year to return the northern port — which sits across the harbour from a defence base hosting 2,000 US Marines annually and tarmacs upgraded for US bomber aircraft — to Australian ownership.

In April, Landbridge’s billionaire owner Ye Cheng lodged a complaint in the World Bank’s tribunal for investment disputes, alleging Australia’s push for the company to sell the port had breached its free trade agreement with China and was taking a discriminatory approach.

“We’re committed to putting the Port of Darwin back into Australian hands,” Marles told reporters Thursday on a visit to Darwin.

“We’re disappointed about the steps that have been taken to put this toward the place of an international tribunal. Obviously, we will do everything in our power to defend that matter,” he said.

Marles also noted the US military was committed to “doing more from Darwin”.

Darwin is Australia’s closest port to Asia, and cargo shipments of commodities including iron ore and liquefied natural gas to China have dominated trade ties.

In January, China’s ambassador to Australia Xiao Qian warned if Landbridge were forced to leave the port it could impact wider trade and investment between China and Australia.

Australian Police Intercept a Diesel Generator Filled With Multiple Drugs

Drug packages encapsulated within an apparent cylinder liner, post-disassembly (AFP)

Published May 21, 2026 9:32 PM by The Maritime Executive

The Australian Federal Police are calling on diesel repair specialists to help with a rare technical problem: the agency has confiscated a used diesel generator that someone packed full with nearly every kind of illegal stimulant on the market, and it needs to find the people responsible for the shipment.

Early this year, Australian Border Force inspectors at Port Botany were conducting routine X-ray inspections of imported cargoes when they noticed something off about a heavy-duty diesel generator, which had arrived from Mexico by way of Malaysia. 

This generator was special: it appeared to have packages inside. The ABF contacted the AFP, who brought in specialists to have a closer look. Over the course of three days, they disassembled the generator and found a total of about 370 kilos of drugs inside; photos suggest the consignment was stashed in a cylinder bore.

Unusually, the shipment was very diverse. Large-scale imports typically have just one or two drug classes, but this one had about 120 kilos of cocaine, 250 kilos of methamphetamine, three kilos of MDMA and 800 grams of 2CB ("pink cocaine"), a lab-made club drug with stimulant and psychedelic effects.  

"This mixed bag of illicit drugs was likely destined for several different criminal groups, to be sold into a range of communities. Despite the elaborate attempt to conceal such a large quantity of drugs, the coordinated efforts of law enforcement ensured these substances never reached Australian streets," said Detective Acting Superintendent Stuart Kimbell in a statement. 

Kimbell said that the AFP is looking for tips from the public - particularly from anyone who might have been approached about storage space for a generator, or spare parts vendors or diesel engine technicians who may have fielded inquiries about repairs. (The make and model of the engine were not released.)

According to ABF, this intercept ranked high on the list for technical complexity and detection difficulty. "ABF officers are highly skilled at identifying anomalies across all forms of incoming cargo, no matter how elaborate the concealment," said ABF Superintendent Jared Leighton.

Separately, the AFP announced that it had busted the alleged ringleader of an insider smuggling network at Port Botany. The 29-year-old suspect stands accused of organizing multiple drug pickup attempts at the port, including a 500-kilo shipment last year. The organizer allegedly paid a competitive wage to entice co-conspirators, up to US$140,000 per person per pickup - nearly three years of earnings for a typical Australian worker. 

Australia is the world's leading per-capita consumer market for cocaine and methamphetamine, and import prices are accordingly high. While wholesale prices fluctuate with availability, cocaine typically attracts more than US$100,000 per kilo on the Australian market. 

 

Trip to recovery: How psychedelics could revolutionise mental health care

Copyright Canva

By Amber Louise Bryce

Published on 17/05/2026 - EURONEWS

In a world gripped by a growing mental health crisis, research suggests that psychedelic-assisted therapy could be an answer. Euronews Health spoke to an expert about how they work, and when - if ever - we might see them approved.

Picture this: You walk into a small, dimly lit room and lay on a bed beside a clinician. After talking you through what’s going to happen, they hand you an eye mask, then administer a controlled dose of the psychedelic compound, psilocybin.

As suddenly as the drug takes effect, the world as you knew it starts to dissolve - the chains of old thought patterns finally loosen.

While it might sound intense, this scenario could be a future reality for those living with treatment resistant mental illness, including depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In recent years, psychedelic-assisted therapies have become one of the most fascinating and fast-accelerating areas of psychiatric research, driven by an ever-growing body of exciting new evidence.

Relate

The current mental health crisis has also created an urgency for new, more effective treatment options, with over a billion people currently living with mental health disorders, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

“Unfortunately, in mental health, and specifically in psychiatry, we haven't really had any new treatments for several decades,” Dr Liliana Galindo, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge’s psychiatry department, told Euronews Health.

“What psychedelics are bringing is the opportunity to have or to present new treatments for people that don't respond to the usual treatments.”

Psychedelics are a class of psychoactive substances that can powerfully alter people's perceptions and moods by binding to serotonin receptors. Popular examples include psilocybin, DMT, phenethylamines (MDMA) and lysergamides (LSD).

While they all share similar consciousness-expanding qualities, each compound varies in its intensity, duration, and overall effect, with different ones being tested for different conditions.

So far, psilocybin, an active ingredient in magic mushrooms, has generated the most promising results.

“For treating depression, psilocybin, specifically the COMP360 (a synthetic formulation of psilocybin developed by Compass Pathways), has already finished phase three of its clinical trials. We are expecting that [Compass] is going to file the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) application soon,” Galindo said.

“Potentially, this could be the very first psychedelic treatment that will be legal and approved.”

How do psychedelic-assisted therapies work?

Up until now, mental health treatments have relied on two evidence-based methods: talk therapies and medications such as antidepressants.

These are proven to be effective, with patients receiving a combination of the two 25-27% more likely to respond positively, according to statistics by the National Institutes of Health.

But for those that don’t respond, other avenues of help remain limited.

“Many mental health conditions have some symptoms that are common, like rigid cognitions. So, for example, when people are depressed, they start to have really negative thoughts, and these negative thoughts are going to affect how they see themselves, how they see the world, and of course, how they are going to feel about it. And after several years of being depressed, it's really difficult to take a step outside of those pessimistic thoughts, or frequent fears and even suicidal ideations,” Galindo explained.

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For these cases, psychedelic medications could be the answer, with Galindo noting their effectiveness at disrupting cognitive ruts and rewiring how the brain processes trauma.

“I really like an analogy I saw once [about psychedelic medications] that it's like when you're skiing. You usually go for a certain pathway, right? And because the pathway has a specific mark, it is really difficult to actually go outside of it. But somehow, what psilocybin allows, is like having fresh snow that will make it easier to actually explore different pathways.”

Numerous studies back this, with a recent one by Imperial College London - considered a world leader in psychedelic research - reporting that even a single dose of psilocybin can prompt anatomical changes in the brain.

Other psychoactive compounds such as MDMA have been shown to work a little differently by enhancing feelings of empathy, connectivity and openness, which could be effective at treating PTSD.

“It facilitates a period of time where people [with PTSD] can revisit their memories and somehow be able to rethink, to reframe, to change the narrative and to process their trauma,” she said.

“This is the reason psychedelics are bringing such a big revolution to mental health, because they're aiming to treat the core rather than only the symptoms.”

Social stigmas and legal issues

A major hurdle to mainstream approval, however, remains their status as illegal drugs in most countries.

“Unfortunately, even if we have clear evidence for their therapeutic potential, they are still illegal. For example, here in the UK, they're still classified A, meaning that in order to conduct any study, we need to apply for a special home office licence. This is not only expensive, but takes a long time, and so is definitely affecting the amount of research that could be happening in the field,” Galindo said.

Another issue is the stigmas surrounding these drugs, and their primary associations with party culture and potentially dangerous outcomes.

Galindo emphasises that these concerns are why the controlled setting of psychedelic-assisted therapies is so important.

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“You need to take care of all the different details of the environment, like the sound, the lights. And of course, the entire time [the patient] is supported by a trained therapist or a member of the staff that is there to be able to support during that process,” she said.

“These drugs are really powerful tools, but of course, if for any reason they are not given in the right setting, this could come with more side effects.”

While more research is required to better understand who will benefit and who won’t, Galindo hopes that, one day, these treatments can become an accessible option for everyone.

“Rather than staying in a private setting, they should be available for the people who need it the most, not only for the ones that can pay.”