Midjourney Is Profitable and Chasing Hardware Dreams. But Can It Survive Google?

Over much of the past year, David Holz, the 37-year-old founder of Midjourney, has devoted himself to a single task: reassuring fans of his AI image-making tool that a new, significant update - v8 - would indeed arrive soon. Initially, Holz said it might come at the end of 2025. That date slipped to January. Then February. Then earlier this month. On March 11, Midjourney users confronted Holz about v8’s ETA on Discord, where Holz takes public questions once a week over video chat in a group with 19.4M followers.