midjourney, inc. — a delaware corporation based in san francisco — is the company; no parent, holding, or umbrella company is publicly evidenced. david holz founded it in 2021 after twelve years building leap motion's hand tracking, and describes it as a self-funded research lab — a claim made on his own statements, never independently verified. every revenue, headcount, and user figure in this dossier is labeled reported, self-reported, alleged, or inferred accordingly. this is the record: the leap motion prehistory, the discord server that became the largest ever hosted, v1 through v8.2, the artist and studio lawsuits, and the medical scanner — plus the gaps the record could not close.
64 sourced events · 17 cataloged writings · 50 coverage items · 322 sources · researched by parallel agent lanes
history the company, sourced and dated — twelve years of leap motion prehistory, the discord opening, v1 through v8.2, the lawsuits, and the scanner. the leap motion decade 2008–2021 — ocuspec becomes leap motion: the controller, orion, north star, two collapsed apple talks, and the ultraleap sale. the founding 2021–2022 — holz leaves, the lab opens a discord server, v1 through open beta, and the state-fair win. the viral year 2023 — v5 photorealism, the pope and the perp walk, the class action, and the $200m no-vc profile. the platform move 2023–2024 — the style-list leak, the stability ban, rooms and personalization, and the escape from discord island. the world-model era 2025– — v7 and v8, the video model, three studio suits, and the 'secret hardware project' that became a medical scanner. people david holz and the people around midjourney — the leap motion cofounder, the staff and advisors, and the community that writes the record. the founder david holz and michael buckwald — the leap motion founders; only one of them founded midjourney. the writing the lab's own documents — the about page, the release notes, the fair-use answer, the medical announcement. the team the 2022 roster, the hardware and storytelling leads, the advisor bench, and the aggregator roster — verified and not. interviews and talks the interviews and the wednesday office hours where the philosophy gets said out loud. the philosophy engine for the imagination, bootstrap independence, the consent answer — and the controversies attached to the people. side quests the pursuits around the lab — leap motion, a print magazine, niji, patchwork, midjourney tv, the hardware program, and the union square scanner. the founder's quests leap motion's twelve years and the society-for-science circuit — what holz carried into the lab. the lab's quests the magazine, niji×spellbrush, rooms, patchwork, midjourney tv, the orb hardware program, the holodeck, medical, and the china episode. the community's quests the recap writers and the ~40-volunteer moderator corps — the community's own infrastructure. coverage what the discourse made of midjourney — the wonder, the backlash, the realism panic, the lawsuits, and the slop saturation. the breakout the economist cover, the cosmo conflation, the canonical verge profile, and john oliver's cabbage wedding. the backlash the state-fair win, the warzel pile-on, rutkowski, the artstation revolt, and the consent quotes going viral. the realism panic v5 photorealism, the pope, the trump-arrest fakes, the free-trial suspension, and the copyright office. the business the $200m no-vc profile, the aggregator ledger, and the traffic-decay analytics — reported figures throughout. the release cadence the release cadence — v5.2 through v8.2, the web editor, omni-reference, video, and hd. the lawsuits andersen into discovery, the style-list leak, disney/universal, the fair-use answer, and warner bros. the saturation the ghibli moment, 'slop' as word of the year, the cara scrape, and the discord-ux debate that never closed. controversies the running debates — the training data, no opt-out, style mimicry, moderation by keyword, the de-protection allegation. sentiment eras sentiment phases: wonder → backlash → realism panic → the lawsuit era and the slop saturation. the idea the independent-lab bet — the lineage midjourney inherited, what it proved about taste and distribution, and what the world-model ambition requires. lineage aaron, deepdream, the belamy sale, the diffusion+clip wave, leap motion, and the craigslist model. what midjourney proved the self-funded outlier, taste as moat, discord as distribution, and the small-lab velocity. what stayed unfinished the text problem, two years on someone else's rails, the free tier, late video, no api, the unshipped world model. the world-model question the case for and against the world-model thesis — images as the cash engine, the bootstrap as strategy, the fair-use exposure. successors ideogram, black forest labs, recraft, the chat platforms — and cara, the successor in the opposite direction. open questions the questions a next attempt has to answer. sources the catalog — every source behind every claim, dated and typed. the catalog the full typed catalog — primary, interview, reporting, archive, community. method how this was researched — parallel agent lanes, the evidence model, and how to correct it. the lanes the parallel research lanes and what the formula proved. the evidence rules the evidence model — confidence, precision, sentiment discipline. known gaps what the research could not verify — recorded, not hidden. corrections how to correct the record. AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.
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