None of this has anything to do with business or innovation. Do you not immediately see that? Most of my friends reaction to this news was that this is so obvious it's almost funny (or actually it is funny, since most were laughing as they read the headline).
I'm curious how you could not understand the relevance of the quote unless you were aggressively trying to not understanding it.
Monet probably wondered how other people couldn't see purple in a haystack.
Leave SpaceX alone you child. Gwynne has it in excellent hands.. find some other way to pay for your juvenile brainfarts.
He's all over the Epstein files and his daughter has publicly verified that the timing works out and the emails are probably legitimate.
https://www.threads.com/@vivllainous/post/DUMBh2Vkk8D/im-jus...
There isn’t a single inventor and reusable rockets emerged through decades of research.
But: SpaceX was the first to make orbital-class reuse routine and economically viable.
The backing table is on page 8. Falcon 9 is (was, in 2018! It’s only cheaper now.) at $2700/kg to LEO. No one else is below $4k, except… Falcon Heavy.
I have not been following the machinations of X very closely. I don't have the corporate structure of Elon's empire in my head, nor do I have the Meta or Alphabet/Google hierarchies in there. I couldn't have told you about the history of xAI beyond that it exists.
So that's plain ignorance of something you consider common knowledge, but I don't, rather than "aggressively trying to not understand it." And that phrase is particularly grating btw.
Essentially means that SpaceX investors are bailing out Elon Musk.
And I say that as someone that despises Elon and the way he casts his companies as due to his personal technical genius.
such a hilarious comment / mindset. he made the best selling car in the world 3 years running. neuralink is a great breakthrough. there are a string of accomplishments which individually would be the greatest thing many many people have ever done.
Not true. What about STS?
Just say "rocket man bad" and save some keystrokes.
Soyuz-2 capacity to LEO: 8,600KG
Falcon 9 capacity to LEO: 22,800KG when expended, 17,500KG when not.
Soyuz-2 Cost to Launch: $35 Million
New Falcon 9 Cost to Launch: $70 Million
Used Falcon 9 Cost to Launch: $50 Million (cost to SpaceX: ~$25 Million)
Soyuz-2 cost per KG: $4000 (data from 2018)
New Falcon 9 cost per KG: $964 when expended, $1250 when not.
Use Falcon 9 coster per KG to Customer: $893 when expended, $690 when not
So realistically, Falcon 9 is roughly 20-30% the price per KG when new, and dropping to a minimum of 17.25% of the price when used.
Plus you get a larger diameter payload fairing and the ability to launch a payload up to 4X the size.
I'm pretty sure that even used as an expendable rocket, 1/4 the price per KG (if you need the capacity) is a pretty significant improvement. Now I understand why satellite ride-shares are so popular!
Hey Jeff, on what day is the wildest party on your island?
Soyuz-2: 12 launches
Falcon 9: 165!
I, by and large, have a strong dislike of Musk to put it mildly. The one thing I will give him, and I think this is his real gift, is he’s absolutely brilliant when it comes to raising capital. He has proven to excel at raising capital, and deploying it well, for extremely capital intensive businesses. I do however wonder if the chickens are coming home to roost because both X and xAI are extremely unprofitable.
I think it’s almost inevitable we will see Space X and Tesla merge. The conditions of that merger will, I believe, say a lot about whether this move was brilliant or batshit.
I agree we'll have to keep digging (or reading other comments, at least) to find a better explanation.
Not only did Elon not found Tesla[0], but many employees have described the "babysitters" or "handlers" who are responsible for making him feel like his ideas have been implemented, so that his caprice and bluster don't interfere with the actual operation of the company.
To give him his due, he's a phenomenal manipulator of public opinion and image, and he certainly has invested a lot of his emerald-generated wealth into numerous successful ventures - but he himself is not a positive contributor to their success.
[0] https://autoworldjournal.com/is-elon-musk-the-founder-of-tes...
But regardless, I think quotes like these should have some commentary around them as it helps create a discussion around whatever point they might be trying to make rather than having to make assumptions.
However, the way Musk has become less subtle with this tells a story. He got away with these shady financial dealings multiple times so he's now becoming even more brazen and transparent with this behavior. We have gotten to the point in which the spin needed to justify his moves is the physics-defying viability of datacenters in space.
The distortion field will keep growing as long as he keeps getting away with it.
I feel that a lot of people simply don't like Elon because of political reasons which are often also based on misinformed opinions. It also can't be denied that he is an intelligent person. You can hear it when he talks in interviews.
Now I think ultimately any ultra wealthy person is going to have some flaws that people can find and latch onto in order to hate someone.
Sources: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee8001 https://www.statista.com/chart/33709/tesla-byd-electric-vehi...
1. Elon is a genius, a real world Tony Stark.
2. How dare you! You're just jealous!
3. Ok, regardless, he's done more to advance EVe and space travel than anyone else alive.
4. Oh God, he's going to cripple US development of EVs and rockets, isn't he?
5. Eh, Mars was never happening in my lifetime anyway.FWIW, SpaceX launched a Tesla roadster into space without first having to merge with Tesla.
Datacenters in space, on the other hand, are a terrible idea because of the laws of physics, which will not get "solved" anytime soon. But don't take it from me, listen to this guy with a PhD in space electronics who worked at NASA and Google:
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
Radiative cooling is the only option, and it basically sucks vs any option you could use on earth.
Second, ai chips have a fixed economic life beyond which you want to replace them with better chips because the cost of running them starts to outpaxe the profit they can generate. This is probably like 2-3 years but the math of doing this in space may be very different. But you can't upgrade space based data centers nearly as easily as a terrestrial data center.
The main benefits to being in space are making solar more reliable and no need to buy real estate or get permits.
Everything else is harder. Cooling is possible but heavy compared to solar, the lifetimes of the computer hardware will probably be lower in space, and will be unserviceable. The launch cost would have to be very low, and the mean time between failure high before I think it would make any economical sense.
It would take a heck of a lot of launches to get a terrestrial datacenter worth of compute, cooling and solar in orbit, and even if you ship redundant parts, it would be hard to get equivalent lifetimes without the ability to have service technicians doing maintenance.
Even if one got the the economics of launching/connecting GPU racks into space into negligable territory and made great use of the abundent solar energy, the heat generated (and in space retained) by this equipment would prevent running it at 100% utilization as it does in terrestrial facilities.
In addition to each rack worth of equipment you'd need to achieve enough heat sink surface area to match the heat dissipation capabilities of water-cooled systems via radiation alone.
You're also passing these judgements without knowing their full plan. Maybe we only know one part of the plan and maybe other details have not been announced. They may have a much bigger plan for this than just the specific information we have.
What I am saying is that clearly SpaceX/xAI feel that this is a viable option based on many experts research/facts that are more knowledgeable than a single bloggers opinion. If I am thinking rationally why would I choose to believe a single random person over a group of experts banking A LOT of money that they have a solution that works?
Kuiper is not under Blue Origin, and there are no whispers of Amazon and BO merging. You're the one being disingenuous in suggesting that companies have to be merged to buy services from - or cooperate with - each other.
As for dismissing the article: the author has a PhD in space electronics, worked at NASA, and spent a decade at Google including on AI capacity deployment. He walks through power, thermal, radiation, and communications constraints with actual numbers. You do not get to hand-wave that away with "he is anti-Elon" and then defer to "the team spending the most money." That is not rational analysis, that is fandom.
And the idea that SpaceX's experts looked at this and concluded the combination makes strategic sense - seriously? This is the same playbook Musk has run repeatedly: SolarCity into Tesla, X into xAI, now xAI into SpaceX. Every time there is a struggling asset that needs a lifeline, it gets folded into a healthier entity with Musk negotiating on both sides. xAI is burning $1B/month. There is already a fiduciary duty lawsuit over Tesla's $2B investment in xAI. The "space data centers" rationale is a pretext for giving xAI investors an exit through SpaceX's upcoming IPO. This is not a strategic vision, it is financial engineering solving an obvious problem for Elon.
Meanwhile, Grok has been generating sexualized images of children, the California AG has opened a formal investigation, the UK Internet Watch Foundation found CSAM attributed to Grok on the dark web, Musk personally pushed to loosen Grok's safety restrictions after which three safety team members quit, and xAI's response to press inquiries was the auto-reply "Legacy Media Lies." This is the company whose judgment you are trusting over a domain expert's detailed technical analysis.
While I certainly won't deny that I do strongly disagree with all of Elon's politics, I'm being as fair and unbiased as I can when I say - we must be listening to different interviews. The man sounds like a caricature of a bumbling college stoner philosophy student most of the time.