Aug 27, 2025

David Holz

Founder, Midjourney

Tharin Pillay

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Tharin Pillay

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Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME.

Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Photo: Bobby Longoria—SXSW/Getty Images)

In July, Midjourney launched Midjourney TV, a 24/7 stream of videos made with its V1 video model. Watching even a few minutes is surreal, hypnotic, and disorienting: as seconds-long clips with disparate styles, subjects, and moods follow one another in endless succession, offering a glimpse of where media might be heading next.

Midjourney was founded in 2021 by serial entrepreneur David Holz, who bills it as an independent research lab aiming to “expand the imaginative powers of the human species.” Within a year, the company had become profitable without investors. By 2024, it reportedly made $300 million. Today, its distinctive image and video generation products have amassed over 20 million users, mostly housed on Discord’s most populous server.

In June, Disney and Universal sued Midjourney, alleging that some of those generated images and videos infringed on copyrights of their characters. In legal filings, Midjourney denies wrongdoing, arguing that both its training process and user outputs are covered under the “fair use” defense, which protects certain uses of copyrighted work. Midjourney did not respond to requests for comment from TIME.

The AI media space has nonetheless become increasingly crowded since Midjourney’s launch, with OpenAI, Google, and others releasing their own image- and video-generation models. But Midjourney stands out for its focus on community: user creations are public by default, allowing others to remix and iterate on them. At any given time, hundreds of thousands of people can be found in their Discord chatrooms, conjuring private visions for an unseen audience.