> My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
This is so obviously false. For one thing, in what fantasy world would the ongoing operational and maintenance needs be 0?
No operational needs is obviously ... simplified. You still need to manage downlink capacity, station keeping, collision avoidance, etc. But for a large constellation the per-satellite cost of that would be pretty small.
The thing being called obvious here is that the maintenance you have to do on earth is vastly cheaper than the overspeccing you need to do in space (otherwise we would overspec on earth). That's before even considering the harsh radiation environment and the incredible cost to put even a single pound into low earth orbit.
Nothing in there is a lie, but any substance is at best implied. Yes, 1,000,000 tons/year * 100kW/ton is 100GW. Yes, there would be no maintenance and negligible operational cost. Yes, there is some path to launching 1TW/year (whether that path is realistic isn't mentioned, neither what a realistic timeline would be). And then without providing any rationale Elon states his estimate that the cheapest way to do AI compute will be in space in a couple years. Elon is famously bad at estimating, so we can also assume that this is his honest belief. That makes a chain of obviously true statements (or close to true, in the case of operating costs), but none of them actually tell us that this will be cheap or economically attractive. And all of them are complete non-sequiturs.