A space company is buying an IDE for roughly the cost to build 150 of world's most expensive modern hospitals [1]. How is this in SpaceX's interest? Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else?
The company that just IPOed is already overwhelmingly "X AI" financially, regardless of the fact that it says "Space X" in the marketing. Whether SpaceX also buys Tesla is hardly even going to move the needle.
StarLink is a bad investment too in my opinion. It is fundamentally a US company that must charge US prices but in the US there are relatively few people who need that tech. Only in more rural areas that are sparsely populated do you not have access to fiber or cable which give better speeds and latency.
The majority of their revenue is overseas. But there they can’t reasonably charge $99/month. And there labor and land are cheap such that you can get fiber laid cheaply and quickly.
StarLink is the only thing about SpaceX that makes a profit. But that's only possible because no one else has a network up there hence it can ask for any price it want. Let's not forget that before StarLink there was Iridium and it got ousted because there was a better offer and I wouldn't be surprised if some other company will eventually go up with a better offer.
They aren't in the black at all, let alone "insanely" so. Maybe if they just did commercial launches on falcon 9, but instead they've been shoveling those "huge margins" straight back into r&d on starship etc.
The Falcon launch business is profitable on its own, which may be what GP meant. Once you include the ~$3 billion in Starship yearly R&D the space segment goes into the red.
It is what I meant. SpaceX has strong division between its operational and R&D arms, and Falcon launch has been insanely profitable from the first F9, even before reuse dropped their costs like a rock. They just invest those operating profits back into the company.
Starlink guided drones are tipping the scales for Ukraine right now. That's what enables the range required to successfully hit trains and fuel trucks supplying Crimea through the "land bridge" made from conquered lands in South Ukraine.
That plus satellite comms. Both Russia and Ukraine were very fond of how it improves communication.
Edit: meant to say that in the time of global instability, weapons tech is going to be valuable.
Not so much Ukraine using drones that use starlink, more the sheer number of starlink sats up and planned, the numbers in the proposed other constellations going up and planned, and the ongoing propensity of Chinese rockets to fragment after use rather than safely de orbit.
For interest:
An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions (2025)
Our calculations show the CRASH Clock is currently 5.5 days, which suggests there is limited time to recover from a wide-spread disruptive event, such as a solar storm. This is in stark contrast to the pre-megaconstellation era: in 2018, the CRASH Clock was 164 days.
Yep, it feels like forever a niche market. As soon as you think about it like fundamental infrastructure (which as I understand it is what we’re supposed to think about) it quickly becomes obvious that cables are better suited. Wealthy enclaves, digital nomads etc will pay for it, but that’s not going to get the revenue they’re hoping for.
You mention that cables are better suited... but that is the whole point of Starlink. Getting cables everywhere is either not feasible or expensive. The rural properties are already mentioned as a very big source of usage right now around the world. But you also have everyone who is using it for some mobile purpose. Whether that be planes, boats, RV's, cars, military, etc... I've even seen people live streaming things using Starlink due to cell towers not giving good enough connections where they are.
While they may not be ideal or people living in Urban areas, they also aren't limited to selling to people who are physically connected by cable like a regular ISP would be.
I think you're underestimating the market here. Especially on the enterprise side when you start thinking of things like airliners, cruise ships, etc...
Agreed, starlink is obviously advantageous from the global (and extra-global) perspective. Running cables is expensive. But so is launching satellites, and it’s hard to see how you reach a tipping point where satellites gets cheaper than the standard boring cable networking that supports the terrestrial internet
Starship is trying to get launch cost down to $10 per kilogram to low earth orbit. At that cost it is not clear to me that cables are better except for short distance point to point backbones. One other issue with cables is regulation or monopoly.
There are two different questions. Are cables cheaper and is Starlink profitable in the long term?
Launching a starlink satellite costs $1.5-2M per satellite for the current design. Each satellite lasts around 5 years and they need 42k of them.
Do the math and you get $13B to $17B per year ignoring inflation and ignoring the massive ground infrastructure that is also needed (costing billions more per year).
Residential plans range from $55-175/month and will make up almost all subscriptions. Most people will get the $85 middle plan, but we'll round up to $100/mo or $1200/yr.
Breaking even with no profit requires 10-15 million subscribers.
As starlink claims to have around 12k subscribers and just 10.5k satellites, I'd guess the system is profitable.
The cable question is still compelling though. Rural fiber costs around $25k per mile. This means that an average $15B/yr buys 600,000 miles of installed fiber every single year.
My conclusion is that the ideal solution would be Starlink keeping total satellites closer to the current 10k number ($4-5B per year) and spending the other $10B/yr running fiber to new areas.
Their subscriber base would drop as new fiber got installed in rural areas overlooked as "not profitable enough", but stabilize at still profitable enough from travelers and truly inaccessible places.
How many people actually live in areas that do not have some sort of broadband? That’s the whole point: this is a product designed for relatively few people.
I think there's a strong chance this is a case of it creating a whole new market though.
There are people whose current behaviour/situations will happen to benefit from this, and that may be a niche, but seems like there's a really solid chance many more people actually will change their behaviour in response to this being available. That's how disruption happens.
To be honest I can easily see the default changing if the service is good enough. I mean it seems like you basically get most of what is good about wired plus a whole load of extra previously totally unavailable benefits. For a price, to be sure, but that'll come down.
> labor and land are cheap such that you can get fiber laid cheaply and quickly.
Which is why all of sub-saharan Africa is crisscrossed in fiber, and every hut in those villages has an ONT zip-tied to the straw walls where they get their symmetrical gigabit service.
There is a huge market even just in the US for Starlink. The worldwide market for people who need internet access in remote places is positively gigantic.
Additionally, Starlink could be hugely profitable if they exclusively sold access to ships and aircraft. You'll never be able to run fiber to those.
They can indeed reasonably charge $99/month to many many millions worldwide who don't have any options for low latency, high speed internet access. You vastly underestimate the need for the service.
On the one hand you have a technology product that’s only relevant to rural consumers. Nine out of ten people have cable already.
On the other hand your margins are amazing because all you do is fly little boxes over everyone’s heads launched with government subsidized rockets. No linemen or plant-hire or contractors to sap your profits.
The biggest threat would be commoditized terrestrial wifi / 5G. The more cell service competition there is, the smaller the market for satellite, until it’s only applicable to 1% of the population (and the poorest 1% at that.)
More like 8.2 out of ten. Either way the remainder is still a pretty decent market. And that's just talking about people in the USA. About 75% of Starlink subscribers are outside the USA.
> and the poorest 1% at that
Not by a lot. People who live in remote areas in the USA tend to have much less money overall, but they tend to spend much less money overall, leading to a similar amount of buying power. Someone who lives remote is more likely to own their home outright or have a relatively small mortgage. Their socio-economic status can appear numerically depressed because the numbers generally don't account for non-monetary consumption. (You got paid a salary and bought salmon from the supermarket. Remote dude fishes for salmon in a local stream. You both traded your time for salmon, but remote dude's salmon is invisible to GDP statistics.)
And furthermore, for them, Starlink would be budgeted for like an essential service rather than a luxury convenience.
> Starlink would be budgeted for like an essential service
As someone who has lived and worked remotely for the bulk of time since 1960 or so, it's not essential ipso facto; myself and most of the people I know have somehow managed to survive sans this supposedly essential service for 60 odd years (since 1935 in my fathers case, he's not dead yet).
Its more compelling use case is a relatively cheap way to integrate vehicle GIS data across four to ten thousand hectares or so (ten thousand to twenty five thousand acres) for farming, mining, exploration, etc.
Globally, its not especially attractive for non civil applications (military use, etc) as it creates a reliance that can have a plug pulled at the worst moments.
You are correct that it's not something any military can/should rely on for any future conflicts.
That doesn't make it useless though. Ukraine certainly finds Starlink attractive for military use. Despite all the misleading headlines and de-contextualised quotes, SpaceX has been reliably on Ukraine's side of the conflict and has been an essential communications fabric for both military and civilian.
Just throwing it out there, Im a Verizon customer in the Tri-State Area and I frequently lose service on the train or bus on my way to the city. It's more than just a 'rural issue'. I looked into getting a StarLink plan for my commute until I realized logistically, at best, I'm a freak sitting next to the window with a satellite dish on the train.
Yeah i'm no fan of Elon but starlink is actually quite useful. It solves a real problem - I need network access anywhere on the globe, for any reason, at any time. they can easily charge what they wish for that (military, air travel, desert tourists etc.)
Most of the areas without good internet barely take home $100/m and a lot of them take home less than that.
If you hooked up every single cargo ship on the planet to starlink, you'd only add around 100k connections and average wages on most of those vessels is $5-8/hr (very few US/EU sailors these days) for a handful of people which tells you how much businesses actually care about their workers who do dangerous jobs.
Elon's award is tied to growing Tesla's market cap - it's pretty transparent that he's just trying to ball-of-mud together everything he can to hit that target and grab the bag.
What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong. Tesla buying SpaceX just for hist bonus and then rebranding to X would be classic Musk.
It's a game for him, but so ridiculous. While Tesla was pushing electrification and SpaceX pushing rapid rocket re-use I kind of tolerated Elon's antics, but since he got involved in politics and DOGE I can't bear it anymore.
>What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong.
I took a look at the proxy statement as they have it outlined in this [0] document (Proposal 4). As currently formulated, Musk has 12 operational goals (like ship 1 million robots or hit 50 billion EBITDA) and 12 market cap goals. These need to be paired together for the shares to vest; so, if he reaches the first market cap number, he also needs to fulfill an operating goal for the first set of shares to be earned. These earned shares vest in ~5 years.
This comes with a huge caveat. If Tesla changes control, those operational goals go out the window and his stock award is based solely on market cap (along with the shares immediately vesting). The share price for this is the greater of:
1. The last traded Tesla price prior to the acquisition, or
2. The per share price outlined in the acquisition.
The "easiest" way to take advantage is to IPO SpaceX (which he did), pump up the market cap, acquire Tesla for a sizable premium, and vest as much of the stock award as you can. It means you get to avoid the operational goals entirely and vest a bunch of Tesla (but soon to be SpaceX) stock.
My understanding is that Musk doesn't have a controlling share of Tesla. So by the letter of the law, a SpaceX acquisition would qualify as a change in control (because we've gone to a new majority owner).
Fascists don't support free speech. Please, learn what that word means[0] and then use it responsibly. We're already seeing the effects of misusing and overusing several other important words for political/societal discourse, and this is one of them. It's entirely unhelpful and lowers the quality of conversation here.
[0] The Doctrine of Fascism is available, for free, in several places. Start there.
One doesn't need to be a free speech absolutist to not be a fascist, far from it; and the exceptions prove the rule - those examples are the definition of exceptional. "10 times…" I can remember people getting banned en masse for changing their profile pic to an NPC character. The difference is night and day.
Have you heard of the term "bad faith argument"? That's a good example.
> - Opposition to political and cultural liberalism
> Yes, banned speech on twitter that trans people use.
I had to check this one. I found two stories. [1] shows that people were warned about speech (e.g. using the term cisgender) but were still able to post without problems. [2] showed that X's rules were updated to prevent harassment in the form of deadnaming or misgendering. I doubt that either supports your assertion to be true.
As to the rest of your answers, you seem to have given away that you didn't read the Britannica article at all:
> - Education as character building
> what
You should know, right? You read the article and made the accusation. You've done this several times:
> - The leadership principle
> idk what this is
> - The “new man”
> or this
There's not really a need for me to be pedantic in the face of such slipshod work, but then again, perhaps you think that not being slipshod is being pedantic. Which would also be wrong, but telling.
Try learning about what fascism is, that would be my suggestion. With a book, while putting your phone away.
pretty much exactly what i expected, you ignored all the YESs and called me dumb and made a ton of assumptions. You dont have to fit a definition 100% you're going to hang on to all the tiny little details and say wholey that he's not a fascists. I think he hit's the major point of the definition. Pedantic bootlicker. The reason I didn't pick up a book at your request is because I'm not wasting my time with you. And, no I didn't read the article, you did and linked it. I only read the definition.
Fascists do claim to support free speech while wielding the apparatus of state to ensure that any speech that they disagree with is suppressed, eg on college campuses.
> Is Musk wielding the apparatus of state to ensure that any speech that he disagrees with is suppressed
He does not need to do that, he has his army of people like you that go around on all socials and wherever you can to post praise, defend him and attack any critics as he was some sort of uber genius savior of mankind. The Musk cult is real.
So... are you arguing that Musk is an opponent of 'free speech' because... a bunch of private citizens argue with you when you speak critically of Musk?
The whole thread (and to be fair, Musk himself most of the time) has lost the plot, since the phrase "freedom of speech" is about the government not restraining or punishing speech. Honestly, what Twitter allowed or not before or after Musk is entirely irrelevant to the concept of free speech. Twitter/X is still just some guy's website.
Musk explicitly centered his DOGE effort on rooting out “woke” programs. This included pulling funding from independent research under the auspices of various government departments.
The Trump administration spent considerable effort strong arming colleges on account of speech that they did not like. Even if you subscribe to FIRE’s “Chicago Statement”, you should find the government interfering with colleges like this a break-glass scenario. “Individual Rights in Education” surely include the right to hold beliefs and teach in a way that the current administration is uncomfortable with.
So yes, these are fascist activities wholly consistent with the other fascist activities that MAGA movement is engaged in.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
The thing is, even the center of the road academics who refrain from such comparisons are noting the similarity. The MAGA movement meets the traditional defining characteristics of fascio. We can be rigid and say that only Mussolini‘s political movement can be properly be called fascist. But if we accept calling Hitler and the Nazis fascists as well, then we open the door to any movement that meets the criteria. And Trump does fit the bill.
You are conflating a strong regime with authoritarian tendencies with fascism. The link you gave could be used to define China and India as "Fascist" as well. Which they aren't. Besides, other categories exist to define regimes, but I guess now the public debate is binary: either you are fascist or you aren't. I agree that it reduces the amount of thinking required, which is always nice I guess.
In the case of Trump, caesarism is likely a better term. Unlike fascists leader such as Hitler or Mussolini, Trump doesn't have an ideology, is heavily corrupt and self-serving and is deeply influenced by a foreign power and lobby. Interestingly, he was stabbed in the back by his closest collaborators at the end of his first term, when he tried his luck. Like Caesar.
But Caesarism is less frightening that "fascism", so...let's ignore it! This strategy is a classic of the communist way of doing propaganda: Russians still whine about "Ukrainian fascists", and in the 80´s in the communist block, everyday you could hear complains about "fascists" at the radio. The Berlin wall is originally named the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart".
Why are you reusing soviet talking points, exactly?
Caesarism/kleptocracy is definitely a more accurate description.
People usually attribute the term fascist to this admin, because of the racial/ethnic retaliatory actions or the neonazi/neofascist base they need to overpower/outweigh the more moderate right.
Actually, Caesar was very self-interested and got very rich from his campaign in Gaul. Plutarch estimated that Caesar brought back (and sold) a million slaves.
The strong minority base that has been artificially inflated to advance the personal interests of the leadership has linear roots dating back to the XX century rhetoric promoters and activists. In Europe there's the militant and militia groups of Gladio and the likes that thrived in illegal affairs and that have persisted and were integrated into power following 90s (case in point in Italy Berlusconi basically legalizing the MSI, AN, FdI and Lega by using his privately owned televisions and media, to acquire an election victory).
Italy is a good example why it's foolish to use "fascist" to describe everything one doesn't like. The European politically correct press was wary of the new "post-fascist" leader of Italy, promising us black shirts and leather boots again. In reality, Italians got a classic right-wing government, which increased work visas for non-european migrants (as they usually do, since doing the opposite of what you were elected for is a common habit in Europe).
In reality "fascist" is a qualifier to frighten white people voting for a right-wing government. Trump base by the way is not fascist, it's the evangelical bible belt. Which is crumbling at the moment, by the way.
I assume that you read the link I provided. It's structured as a 10-point list. The 10 points of comparison are:
1. a mythic past and national rebirth
2. victimhood and humiliation
3. hierarchy and dehumanization
4. contempt for weakness
5. the cult of action
6. the leader as savior
7. the purification of institutions
8. propaganda and the assault on truth
9. the merger of state and corporate power
10. violence and terror
It's not stretching things in the slightest to say that MAGA and Trump fit these to a T, certainly post-1/6 if not before. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we shouldn't be too timid about using the word "duck." Do China under Xi and India under Modi also fit the bill? Maybe. I don't think they check 10/10 boxes perfectly though.
I know we're running up against HN rules, so I'm trying to keep this meta and not object-level. I'm not debating whether any of this is defensible or good or bad policy or whatever. Just whether we should use the term.
The first Trump administration was arguably Caesarism. The second has proven to be an entirely different character. Just picking on one thread that is more on-topic for HN: the merger of state and corporate power (#9 on the list above) is a defining economic characteristic of fascism that we are only now seeing this term, with direct acquisition of large stakes in Intel, IBM, GlobalFoundaries, various rare-earth metals companies, and Westinghouse. OpenAI is in negotiations to do this, and even before concluding a deal the government has already been weaponized against their chief competitor, Anthropic.
Other things have progressed (regressed?) significantly in this second term against the above metrics. Unlike the first term, which mostly rode out the instability, we saw in 2025 far reaching restructuring of the civil service. And trans oppression and scapegoating, for example, is seriously reaching levels comparable to Nazi jew hatred and victimhood. As someone who lost my European relatives to the holocaust, I do not make that comparison lightly.
Seeing as ICE is currently building / converting hundreds of new detention centers all over the country, it is reasonable to be worried.
The definition you are using is far too broad, so you get a barnum effect where every authoritarian political movement could be shoehorned as "fascist". Ask real fascists what they think of Kash Patel.
Benito Mussolini, who first used the term fasci in its modern meaning to describe his party and movement, was not a racist. A cultural nationalist, yes, but he thought the nazi biological race ideology was bullshit and openly said so. The racial discrimination laws were only enacted after he went to Munich, hat-in-hand.
Yeah, anyone who openly calls themselves a fascist are probably white supremacist nazis, and I presume would take a dim view of Kash Patel for that reason alone. But genetics-driven racism (as opposed to cultural nationalism) was never a core tenant of fascism. Fascism requires an us-vs-them othering world view, but it doesn't have to be race-based.
Us-vs-them worldview is I think a very common thing in the world. Was the Soviet Union fascist? Is India fascist due to its extreme antagonization of Pakistan (and vis-versa).
What you say about Mussolini is false by the way and Italy enforced strict racial discrimination in Ethiopia. Political racism was commonplace everywhere at the time and is not very specific to Fascism. Unless 1930´s USA was a fascist country, which I doubt.
The existence of a fascist movement in the country doesn't make it fascist. France had a similar movement at the same time and wasn't fascist, for example.
I feel like it has to eventually become X. Just because he’d find it funny for the stupidest people in the world to post about how he’s turned Twitter into a $2t or whatever company.
> Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong.
It counts and it's not wrong.
Sure, the Tesla award takes into account any M&A but growing a 2T company to 3T is a 50% increase.
While growing a 1T company to 2T is a 100% increase so it's expected to be easier for him to hit his award targets with the companies merged as opposed to not merged.
If we combine the market cap of the entire S&P500 we get close to 70T. That doesn't mean any of those individual companies are any more valuable or any of the investors are any richer. It makes no sense that Tesla shareholders would be ok with paying out a performance bonus just for M&A that doesn't grow the value of Tesla and would just dilute their shares.
Well yeah it doesn’t make a ton of sense but the shareholders already cast their vote on this. I’m not sure what they expect would happen but I also don’t think they care. Elons shareholders are a special kind of financial sycophant.
We're talking about his Tesla grant so SpaceX's grant is irrelevant.
The text written in the link you did not read, states "Notwithstanding Sections I, II and III above, in the event of a Change in Control, the Operational Milestones shall be disregarded".
Because that's the grand plan from the start. You don't put a sentence like "In other words, upon a change in control where Tesla is acquired, vesting of milestones under the CEO Performance Award does not require the achievement of a matching Operational Milestone." if you didn't think Tesla could be acquired.
The goal is to give Elon his 2012 award package but making it his 2018 one.
No. He is making it an AI company. The prospectus makes that clear. Everything is in service of training and deploying AI. Twitter is data, distribution and marketing, space x is distribution with data centers and internet in space. Cursor is training data and hostile distillation.
That prospectus didn't make anything clear. It was pictures of rockets and rubbish about "the light of consciousness". The only real information was buried deep in the middle and it showed a company with poor finances and no clear path to success. Certainly not something worth the likes of Amazon.
How much mass do we need to put in orbit to radiate 10 GW of data center heat? How much rocket fuel does it take to lift the rocket fuel required to lift that mass? Which part of this is cheaper or more effective than building data centers 100 feet below the ice in Antarctica ? Other than serving workloads that are already in orbit, I don't see the point. How much addressable market do we have for AI compute that is already in orbit?
The appeal is solar power efficiency gains. And yes it is a notable amount of extra mass, but not a deal-breaking amount. Latency is pretty minimal regardless of location (sub-100ms) which is not nothing but it's minor for things like serving AI inference.
Not saying I think it's the best idea, but it is theoretically feasible.
When you say it is not deal-breaking - have you looked at any math? Real world data finds we need about 6kg of radiator surface to radiate 1kW. [0] . A 100MW datacenter would need about 600,000 KG just of radiator mass. ISS was only 450,000KG and it took 13 years to assemble. Meanwhile, we're projected to launch 600X that data center capacity on earth in just the next three years.
To say that this is pure folly is an understatement. It is not folly, and it is not foolishness. It is fraud.
It exists, but "works quite well" is only for a small amount of heat. It takes a big radiator to get rid of heat to ax vacuum. Much easier and cheaper to just keep the computers on earth and cool them with standard air or liquid cooling setups.
The required radiator for cooling isn’t that much larger than the required solar panel for powering the thing in the first place, and you don’t see everyone saying those are impossible. Is it easier to keep them on the ground? Obviously, but that wasn’t the claim. It just isn’t nearly as hard to cool things in space as a lot of people seem to think.
NewBird AI is an AI company which had an extremely irrational stock price bump because it's all about AI. It AI'd its AI with some more AI to AI harder with AI... and that equaled money.
If you're writing a prospectus right now and want a lot of large institutional investment you put AI between every letter. We are in a bubble, I don't think there's any disagreement about that, when the bubble will pop nobody knows - but while we're in this bubble everything is AI. I think it's unwise to read that prospectus in good faith given all the other factors (the court case against OpenAI, the race to IPO first, Google's additional stock grant, Elon's history of corporate bailouts) that are pretty plain to see.
To launch the data center into space and the satellites that deliver the data to users over star link. The same reason standard oil owned railways. Controlling distribution is a competitive moat no one else can replicate. Only antitrust stopped the standard oil monopoly. Not market forces.
Counterpoint: what if he lied in the prospectus? With Elons proven track record of misleading investors and customers I think that possibility has to be considered.
I agree with this, but it seems so crazy to me. How can money be a motivator when you're that rich. I'm not even "rich" but I'm already at a point where money is far from my #1 motivator.
I LOVE puppies, but if I had a trillion of them the last thing I'd want is another puppy.
An interview I recently read with Seth Rogen was very illuminating (from the NY Times):
"You know how every once in a while you read one sentence and it snaps your whole perspective into place? I remember reading that book “Going Clear,” about Scientology, and there was one sentence about how if famous people aren’t treated in a certain way, it makes them think they’re not as talented as they wish they were. Like, if I go to a restaurant and I have to wait 20 minutes for a table instead of them just seating me right away, am I not as talented as I thought I was? If someone has a nicer hotel room than me on the press tour, does that mean I’m not as good an actor as I thought I was? I think that’s how a lot of famous people interpret how they’re treated."
I think the same applies to Musk. The money is a proxy for how much everybody thinks he is a special genius. Anything in his life that makes him feel less special requires more validation that he is, and money is the easiest validation he is able to acquire.
Did he really win? His kids all hate him, his wives all left him, he has no real friends. Anyone he interacts with is purely after money and power they can get from him. He spends all day being angry on twitter.com.
I think the point of the Rogen quote is that there's no real way to win. This is not cope by the not mega-rich and famous. It's an inevitable result of wanting universal acclaim.
Musk has more money than most of us would dream of, but the game isn't over until it's over.
Speaking just for myself, I've lost respect from Elon Musk. I admire Musk's accomplishments, especially Starship and the Falcon rockets. But I don't respect Musk's personal judgement, his moral integrity or his ethics.
He doesn't know me, and he doesn't care about my opinion (or care about ethics for that matter). But there are a lot of people like me who used to respect him and no longer do. He's surrounded himself with fawning sycophants. At some level he's got to know this, and that the people pretending to pay him respect aren't themselves worthy of respect.
Musk is probably a clinical narcissist (NPD). If that's the case, no amount of power, status, or riches (or ketamine) will ever be enough
Their motivations are often cartoonishly superficial and... well... stupid. Stupid in ways that are baffling to most people (even most other neurodivergent). The kind of stupid that drives somebody to secretly pay pro-gamers to play games for them so they can pretend to be a pro-level gamer, only to then expose their own fraud by playing the game themselves on a live stream, without knowing how to actually play it. And then pretending to have connection issues when people start noticing.
I have no trouble believing Musk has simply internalized the identity of being the world's richest man and now has a pathological need to maintain that status, no matter what
It can't and it's just not. People use the word "money" for different things. He's not doing it for another bill or a number on some screens- neither are most employees of those companies. That's just projecting values on someone else.
The things they're trying to accomplish require extreme amounts of capital.
> The things they're trying to accomplish require extreme amounts of capital.
This could really cut either way. Like assume you mean he’s trying to do something good or noble (lmao) but the other obvious way to read this would be that he’s interested in becoming wealthy/powerful enough to bend the will of a nation before him and burn the world for a laugh.
It’s just funny how the markets seem to want to value him as some sort of AI visionary when his companies are not even in the top 5 for AI, despite his endless resources.
The way I see it, he's already well past the "wealthy/powerful enough to bend the will of a nation before him and burn the world for a laugh" but still needs to keep working to do his (and companies) stated "good or noble" goals. Why do the fervid anti-Elon people not even bring up his many flaws or mistakes and always concoct weird reality-orthogonal situations?
Ok sure I can be more more direct: how does aligning himself to the republican party and taking a detour to unwind as many social programs as possible in any way help his stated goals, corporate or otherwise?
The only answer is the dude is a self-service piece of shit. He has no principles and is not trying to accomplish anything other that exploit for the sake of exploitation.
That's not the only answer, it's just the one you want. There was a clear coup of the Democratic Party (or just shifting of values) that was jeopardizing both the actual climate change issues and the mission to mars. You can keep trying to find ways to justify the idea that he's just completely selfish, just wants money, or whatever, but you're going to have to do a lot more work.
I don't think you can describe his beliefs using booleans like that: you have to use a numeric scale. It would be be correct to say: Elon would need a hell of a lot of ketamine to believe a colony on mars is a possibility.
It's not exactly like Cookie Clicker. Many people definitely like seeing the number going up, but for most people that get to that point of wealth, the goal is power that the money represents. A human being may struggle to relate to them, but they really are motivated by the sole desire to own and control everything.
Yes you can. Money is a medium of exchange. Stock is a medium of exchange. But they buy the ability to effectuate your will in the world. If you have a vision of the world money, human capital, political power are not the measure of success or the goal. They are the instruments of executing a vision.
Some people aren't motivated by money, they are motivated by reputation, or pathology.
Yep, bundle it all together, rename the whole company X (for added confusion), get a few final pay outs in the hundred of billions if not trillions and then Elon flees to Argentina as the whole house of cards crumbles.
Does anyone really believe he’s doing all of this just to sell out and live on a beach somewhere? This dude sleeps at his own factories. He literally works like 24/7 and has no personal life. If this was all a cash grab he’s had dozens of opportunities to cut and run with well beyond F U money. If you wanted to scam people there are a lot easier ways to do it than repeatedly founding revolutionary technology companies.
I’m not denying that his companies are awash in zany financials, but I don’t think that’s ever been the point
The optimistic take is that he is doing all this to achieve his space goals, that the ends are justification of the means.
But when he is interested in actively interfering with elections the world over and probably spends more time on twitter than anything else, I am not so sure.
The thing with the sell out routine is that they think it is all working until it suddenly isn't. The money isn't about living the high life it is about having the high score. Bezos is probably trying to figure out how he can take the No 1 spot right now. If Elon is smart, we will cash out right before the fall.
Yup - given that it’s $60bn of stock, now is an excellent time to do it, as the current valuation isn’t even irrational. And I say that as someone who believes they have great long term prospects.
They also seem to be desperate to buy their way into a monopoly, even though the company itself has a long track record of failing to deliver anything noteworthy.
FOMO; Apple grew to one of the biggest companies over time and people were like "h*ck I should've bought it years ago". Tesla then seemed somewhat similar - also 5 years ahead of the curve for EVs, even if they reinvented things that didn't need to and their construction was substandard, so one group of investors bought and boosted the stock to impossible heights. Now SpaceX is the next one, and people want to get on board.
I don't think anybody actually believes SpaceX will be worth it. I think some still believed Tesla would be, but their competition has caught up. Everybody is just there to ride the wave of mass hype and FOMO, thinking everybody else is an idiot.
This has been coming in a few waves over the years in Tesla, cryptocurrencies, the Everything Bubble, etc.
> It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes
No, it is not. This is not legal or financial advice, but I believe the stock could easily rise 2.5x - not because of its current or future financial condition, but because it is run by what may be the most skilled fraudster our planet has ever breed. Charles Ponzi himself couldn't have pulled this off. While most CEOs are careful about what they publicly say or "predict," Musk's companies are fueled by increasingly fantastical projections. The consequences have amounted to some $1.5 million in SEC fines that, relative to the value created, were negligible - and that was under the previous administration. The current one won't be any more aggressive. The closest comparison I can think of is Trevor Milton and his famous "electric" truck that was filmed rolling downhill under its own momentum. He went to prison for that, although he was later pardoned by Trump. Many people have lost fortunes betting against Tesla based on fundamentals. SpaceX's shareholder list includes so many influential and powerful names, including people closely connected to the current administration, that I find it hard to imagine the stock being allowed to fail in any meaningful percentage. Obviously I'm exaggerating when I say the government would send agents door-to-door to collect valuables from American households to plug any hole in the balance sheet before allowing the stock to fall significantly. But that's honestly closer to how protected I think the company is than what traditional financial analysis would suggest. I'm nobody special, just someone with about $1.8 million in a stock portfolio. Yet this thing called SpaceX stock gives ordinary investors like me a chance to ride alongside the biggest players on their way to even larger fortunes. They are guaranteed not to lose money, and to me its not personal.
I mostly agree but it still seems like a huge risk to play along with the memestock-ery. I have no idea how long this can be sustained. Like, would the upcoming elections going a certain way cause things to unravel? Or, say, the Anthropic IPO tanking and shaking investor confidence (highly doubtful, but a relevant example.) Or would some other unrelated event essentially cause a gigantic rug-pull?
And this is before getting to worrying about what kind of large-scale market manipulations we're up against (e.g. relevant example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hershshefrin/2025/04/05/signifi...) Compounding this is the fear that even the indexes seem to be compromised (fast-tracking SpaceX etc.) I'm paranoid but at times the entire US stock market looks like a gigantic pump-and-dump. (Seriously, some of the stocks, like NET, rise and fall with highly predictable regularity.)
I can't tell, and I know I'm not nearly smart enough, attentive enough, and definitely not well-connected enough to have the perfect timing required to survive a sudden shift or whatever game it is the big players are playing, so I'm just trying to play it safe (which is also hard, because everything is impacted at this scale!)
The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX is finite. There are only so many nation-states and large corporations that want to launch payloads into orbit.
And even if their internet service provider is uniquely capable for now, it only fills a strategic need for certain customers.
So instead, Musk and Co. need to find bubbling market trends that look like they will have huge gigantic TAMs to justify the potential growth of this company.
All markets are finite. But you're thinking too finitely -- remember that there was a proposal to use Starship (BFS?) as a point-to-point method of people transport too (London to Sydney in under 50 minutes I seem to remember).
You also have other services: Starlink is an obvious one they're pursuing now, but there's many other things that they could branch into with no effective competition right now, from harvesting resources such as Helium-3 to Rare Earths (ironic name), to... (thinks for several minutes) banishing people to the Phantom Zone?
But you get what I mean, it's not just about rockets, it's about the things cheap and reliable rocketry enables.
Musk is a genius creating really exciting ideas. No doubt about that.
But as they say,"the devil is in the details"
- Can Starship transport people from London to Sydney safely economically, compared to Boom, which is working on a supersonic passenger aircraft ?
-Why can the boring machine dig tunnel at much lower cost than it's competitors? Maybe it's because the everyone else tries to dig tunnels for trains, which have a much larger diameter than Musk's boring machine, which only fits his "Teslas at a tunnel" concept?
And it might be a good idea. Worth a try. But be honest about it.
-Sure, data centers in space probably have some great uses, and I'm happy he's trying, but will they ever be more economical than deploying servers on the ocean? On countries with very cool climate?, powered by new energy technologies?
I'm not sure I understand. From a quick google search it seems like they are designing and manufacturing it themselves (with a few partners). Am I missing something, or is your information out of date?
The industrial bases of entire nations military aviation have been taxed for years/decades to produce supersonic capable engines simply for high maintenance fighters, now do that for affordable maintenance low headcount passenger jets. I'm not going to say impossible, but it will take more than VC money and anonymous 'partners' to convince me its likely.
For it to have a chance the US gov. needs to do IP transfer and pair them with NASA for test as they did with SpaceX, more realistically simply twist Pratt&Whitneys arm a bit...
Boom is planning to operate at Mach 1.7 (approx. twice that of current aircraft) with a range of about 4250 nautical miles (4900 miles, 7900 km). Over land they're only going to fly at Mach 1.3 to reduce sonic boom effects.
That's not enough range to do London - Sydney, it's not enough to do Los Angeles to Sydney either, or Los Angeles to Tokyo, it's basically a replacement for trans-Atlantic flights only because even US cross-continental Mach 1.3 is only about 50% faster than a 737 (3h vs. 5h)... It's pretty much geared to the prestige market only.
Under an hour to anywhere on the planet, meanwhile, is absolutely someone would be a premium for -- and they'll do it for most/all long haul flights if it was available.
Starship isn't a proven manned transport vessel yet. And Boom was founded in 2014.
If I was to hazard a guess, the BFS concept is 2035 at the earliest, most likely 2040 -- and it'll be at a much smaller scale than previously advertised.
Which hasn't yet been proven to be either technically or economically viable, even on paper. It's a pipe dream.
The cynical viewpoint is that this is Elon capitalizing on current datacenter hype to inflate SpaceX's valuation based on theoretically overcoming tremendous amounts of hard physics problems, over the next 5-10 years. As he did with FSD, Boring Company / Hyperloop, Twitter, etc.
Neither was reuse of rockets and I remember the ex-boss of Arianespace laughing at those bozos of SpaceX who try to pretend that they are a serious space business.
Musk made some bad bets, but also some good ones (Falcon rockets, Starlink) and some at least promising ones (Starship, Neuralink). And Twitter bought him enormous political influence - I wouldn't consider this a failure either, from the realistically-cynical point of view. That cannot be measured by revenue alone.
I think the jury is still out on the impact of all the other social networks.
If the connection between fast falling birthrates and smartphone addiction is proven, the total global loss of life (in this case, never born life) due to the products that many of us here helped craft into perfection may rival that of Mongol expansion under Genghis Khan, and Twitter/X is hardly the worst offender in that group. Even Twitter's impact on the balance of left/right politics in the world is relatively transient and small when judged against this horrible development whose aftereffect will stalk the world for a century.
Yes, it wasn't an actual intent of people like Zuckerberg, but as far as catastrophic failures of civilizations go, they don't have to be intended.
Then there is the role of Starlink terminals in an actual war.
The losses caused to the Russians by drones using Starlink for connection are pretty painful, and when SpaceX switched off non-whitelisted terminals in the theatre of war, the Russian army was thrown into disarray due to sudden failures of communication between their units. AFAIK they haven't yet fully overcome that problem.
The Russians certainly wish to have something like Starlink right now, in 2026.
In the first weeks of the war, Russia targeted communications infrastructure in Ukraine. They performed cyberattacks against Viasat, rendering thousands of satellite modems unusable. They performed destructive cyberattacks against Ukraine government and telecommunications targets. Cell towers and fibre optic lines were targeted, as well as electricity infrastructure. And they started aggressively jamming wireless communications. Much of this was disastrously effective.
Starlink was one of the only reliable ways Ukraine had for remote military communications, without which Ukraine would have not been able to defend its territory nearly as effectively. Though it's impossible to know, it's plausible that Ukraine might not exist today but for Starlink.
Personally, I don't think so, but let us at least try to be consistent.
"If an unpopular person's corporation C succeeded at activity X, it is the success of the regular employees and everyone but him, but if his another corporation D failed at activity Y, it is solely his responsibility and shame (if not a proof of outright fraud)" is a classical emotionally charged double standard.
Do you think there's a single Apple fanboy who thinks that Steve Jobs ever had any novel insight in programming, or had any novel insight in circuit design?
Now, with that answer in mind, allow me to contend that there isn't a single Elon fanboy who thinks that Elon is personally inventing automotive and rocketry technologies out of whole cloth.
What both men did well is identify promising unconventional technology pathways and steer capital investment towards them. Jobs had a knack for understanding computers as a consumer product, and for communicating the value of new products. Musk has a knack for understanding the limits of physical engineering, and the wealth (and appetite for risk) to spam the right "build" buttons endlessly.
Beyond a narrow range of remarkable competencies, neither are particularly interesting persons. I wouldn’t look to either of them for takes on sociology, politics, biological sciences, philosophy or chord progressions.
Do they, really? Because putting data centers in space would mean multiplying the infrastructure cost by a few orders of magnitude, while being far, far away from cheap energy - photovoltaics would work, certainly, but it will take a lot of it, and it's not like you can just slap panels on the roof - easy cooling, and people.
It's a ridiculous idea, and I don't believe it's what they are really pursuing.
I still have no idea how that would work. Imagine launching an entire data center building into space, and then imagine also launching a solar array to power it, and then also launching a gigantic radiator to cool it... and the radiator is full of some kind of liquid that can never leak even though it's in a vacuum.
Like, sure, but also, that seems like a lot of work, a lot of extra cost, and a lot of risk, all just to avoid building it in Kansas.
It was also hard for many people to imagine a reusable booster, a belly flopping Starship, catching the largest booster ever built with “chopsticks”, a 10,000 satellite constellation, etc.
Orbital compute is technically very feasible. We’re not talking about a datacenter-sized structure, but a lot of rack-sized satellites connected by laser links. SpaceX has gotten pretty good at building, launching, and managing large constellations.
Economically it obviously it has challenges, but there are some advantages (6x solar production, free real estate, less regulation, arguably simpler cooling) to balance the extra costs (launch, radiators, lack of access for maintenance, limited lifespan, etc).
>It was also hard for many people to imagine a reusable booster, a belly flopping Starship, catching the largest booster ever built with “chopsticks”, a 10,000 satellite constellation, etc.
I don't actually think this would be hard to imagine. I've been a huge fan of Space X since it's launch exactly because these types of things do seem feasible because they save so much of money if they are achievable.
A moon base with a secondary launch site, yes. Mining asteroids for precious metals, definitely. I'm not some Luddite.
My only point here is that you can build a data center on the ground trivially easily. Any data center that can exist in space could much more easily exist on the ground... where you can update it and fix things that go wrong. The only issue is politics. I'm entirely happy to be wrong here. If someone can explain the thesis, I'd be happy to get on board.
Solar power is already one of the cheaper (and cleaner!) forms of power generation. In dawn dusk sun synchronous orbits where satellites are always fully illuminated the panels will produce around 6 times as much electricity as those on the ground. And you don't need batteries to operate 24/7 (and as a bonus, the satellites will follow the work day demand curve through the day, reducing latency, at least for some people).
A fully reusable Starship will drastically change the economics of both initial launch as well as maintenance. I expect it will become more feasible to send vehicles to refuel/repair/replace components and keep satellites flying longer. Especially for orbital compute where there will be relatively few dense orbital planes. SpaceX showed modular servers in their video https://youtu.be/k3Un1TizSNg?si=14-bjxXkiyM6cxpg&t=36
First off, let’s not pretend rocket launch dependent solar is “cleaner.” Be reasonable. Solar + saline batteries is pretty damn clean.
Yes, I watched the video. It’s talking about solar and radiators. I agree, if we can solve solar and radiators, it’s feasible tech.
I’m still not entirely sure it’ll be competitive with solar data centers on the ground. I realize I’m no expert, but it just seems like a bizarre way to do computing.
Everything I like about Space X is about doing things that you can't do on earth, because you can't do them on earth feasibly.
> Everything I like about Space X is about doing things that you can't do on earth, because you can't do them on earth feasibly.
I agree those kinds of things are more exciting, but the other angle is SpaceX needs an excuse to do lots of Starship launches, just like Starlink has done for Falcon 9. If orbital compute can at a minimum be profitable enough to pay for the launches it will help bring the cost of Starship down and the reliability up, allowing SpaceX to do more with Starship.
(Of course if orbital compute merely breaks even then maybe the current valuation isn’t justified)
> catching the largest booster ever built with “chopsticks”
I've heard this often. It's not what happens. More correct to say that engineers (not Musk) got a booster to land in a pre-specified spot. The "chopsticks" aren't waving around to catch anything flying by. The booster comes to them.
LMAO, ok, how about “precisely landing the largest flying structure ever built such that it could be grabbed by two mechanical arms attached to the launch pad”?
That will make it clear it’s not actually a giant Mechazilla robot reaching out to grab the booster using literal chopsticks where ever it happens to come down.
You should actually stop and try to imagine it, or failing that, read some of the proposals from companies who want to do it.
None involve launching buildings.
You can look at their models for comparisons with Kansas. There is literature and papers you can read about this. Some go back decades if you include space power transmission, which are related.
That's the cool part, scoofy. You don't need to understand how it will work, you don't need to take any physics classes, round up enough investors, seek out and explain the basic ideas with the people who will make it happen, or invent anything new. Nor do you need to understand political sciences, taxation, jurisdictions, supply chains, or anything else needed to understand the question behind the Data Centers in Space solution.
You aren't even being roped into it with taxes, nor do you have to buy a single share. Other than willingly reading about it on whichever news sources you choose, your observed life will not change a single bit.
You can choose to seek out that info, or you can remain blissfully ignorant. But please don't join the online cacophony of people polluting the threads thinking everyone wants to understand just how ignorant they are.
I get it, I really do. It's a hard task and you don't understand it. But WHY do you feel the need to share that you don't understand? Do you think it makes you look smarter? Do you feel like you fit in more now? If you seek to understand, why aren't you asking questions??
>You aren't even being roped into it with taxes, nor do you have to buy a single share.
Because of the eventual index inclusions, and insane market cap, this affects nearly everyone with a retirement account. Unless you aren't tracking big indexes for some reason.
And some of our compute will run in space, the point is that it's all happening in the background. Most people have no idea how their retirement accounts work beyond knowing it's a bunch of companies pooled together. You don't need to understand how stocks get traded through Alternative Trading Systems, how the companies can decide to take profits vs paying out dividends, etc. A lot of the information is freely available, but you don't need to understand it or take any action.
It's much more likely SpaceX will continue building more ground data centers and using their sat relays to make global connection faster than ground connections can allow.
Yes but the statement is in fact a milestone to meet in order to vest Class B stock options, specifically SPCX needs to put 100 terawatts of compute [1] in outer space and beam it back to somewhere, my guess is Earth.
There's even more rewards for putting a million people on Mars and reaching a market cap of 7.5T by a certain date. Oh yeah he has to stay employed too.
From the SEC Form 3 filed June 12th:
1) This Form 3 does not include 1,302,072,285 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock issued to and held of record by the Reporting Person, which may be voted by the Reporting Person, and the vesting of which is subject to the satisfaction of certain performance and other conditions. 1,000,000,000 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock vest upon (i) the Issuer's achievement of specified market capitalization milestones across 15 equal tranches ranging from $500 billion to $7.5 trillion, with each milestone reflecting $500 billion in additional valuation, and (ii) the Issuer's establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, in each case, subject to the Reporting Person's continued employment ("SpaceX CEO Award"). 302,072,285 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock vest upon (i) the Issuer's achievement of specified market capitalization milestones across 12 equal tranches ranging from $1.065 trillion to $6.565 trillion, with each milestone reflecting $500 billion in additional valuation, and (ii) the Issuer's completion of non-Earth-based data centers capable of delivering 100 terawatts of compute per year, in each case, subject to the Reporting Person's continued employment ("AI CEO Award")
The way people just casually use that word again now is so sad. And I don't even mean that in an "I'm offended" way, but more of "I'm embarrassed by the way you're trying to be offensive" way.
> I'm embarrassed by the way you're trying to be offensive
Oooor, try this one on for size:
What if they're not out to cause offense and the malice you impute is just an illusion under which you yourself are laboring alone? What if it was a well understood and not particularly offensive vernacular usage from before people decided they ought to spend their time being offended on behalf of hypothetical listeners?
Why use a word that has some offensive quality to it when other words would be just as effective in communicating whatever you're trying to communicate? You're actively making a decision that you know will cause some level of offense. So the only conclusion I can make is that some level of offense is intended.
In 2004 I used to volunteer as a tutor at an afterschool center in a low income housing project. One day a middle schooler was complaining about how much homework they had and I ribbed them a little, "oh, poor baby."
They were stung. "I'm not poor!" I felt so bad about it that it's stuck with me all these years. Does that mean because I've seen first hand how hurtful it can be that I should chide people whenever they use the P word?
"Chide" is not the word I would use because there is a very obvious difference between the offensiveness of "poor" and "retard", you obviously know that. But yes, if I heard another volunteer at a program for low income kids use "poor" in that offhanded context and I saw the pain it caused in those kids, I think it's reasonable to take that volunteer aside and say "be careful using terminology like 'poor' as it can be surprisingly hurtful to kids that are self-conscious about that". You can do that sort of thing in an informative and compassionate way without being "chiding".
And that analogy isn't even accurate because I'm not the one informing you that the word can be hurtful. You're using it already knowing that. So a better question is did you continue to say "oh, poor baby" to the kids who were hurt by your original comment?
Why would you think I'd continue to say it after realizing I'd inadvertently hurt the kid's feelings? You are making assumptions of ill will from me in the anecdote I shared just like you are making assumptions about the OP intending offense because you didn't like their word choice.
>Why would you think I'd continue to say it after realizing I'd inadvertently hurt the kid's feelings?
I don't think you would continue using it, that was the point I was making and it sounds like you now agree with me that we shouldn't be knowingly offensive.
And my point is that I went out of my way not to use it any more in that circumstance.
Yet in the years since, I still talk about poor decisionmaking, poor luck, poor performance, and poor word choice. Because it would be poor logic to go through life auditing everything I say just in case a middle schooler with a somewhat poor vocabulary might mistake my meaning.
Which brings me right back to "there is a very obvious difference between the offensiveness of 'poor' and 'retard', you obviously know that."
"Poor" has non-offensive uses so you can continue to use it in other ways. You don't need to advocate for the non-offensive uses of a slur. You know regardless of the context, some people will be offended by its use.
Mercy me, a slur? Retarded also has a non-offensive meaning. It just means slowed.
In fact, while I wasn't around at the time I'd wager that "mentally retarded" came into an official usage specifically because it was a clinical, sterile, bloodless, and utterly anodyne descriptive term. Moron, imbecile, and idiot all were once clinical terms. And then people throw them back and forth at each other to call each other stupid, they gained an offensive connotation and new terms were needed.
In 20 years will you find it absurd if people say that "differently abled" is a slur? Will you say "this is nuts, we literally came up with that term to avoid offense?" I will!
I just showed this to a Black person and they said it was regarded, whatever that means.
More seriously. Is "moronic" okay? It's just an ever so slightly more archaiac way to say retarded. The meaning, the negative connotation, the level of offense—it's synonymous and analogous across the board in its time.
Is it okay because "nobody means it like that, they're just using it as a synonym for stupid?" If so, congratulations, you now understand the other side of the argument better than when you started.
Yes, I think there is an intention to cause or risk offense. On the other end, I think there is an intention to be offended and failure to mitigate.
It is a fairly common conflict that arises as a flashpoint in many areas. Different social and legal theories come up with radically different standards.
If someone has a cold, should they not go shopping out of caution for others? If someone is immune compromised, is it their responsibility to take precautions in a store?
oh, no it's exactly as jimmy valmer puts it, there is nothing against mentally disabled people, it is just it's something so stupid that one can't even decide were to start to describe all the points in which is stupid, so stupid doesn't possibly cut it
Bringing back and pinning the word to not derail the discussion of "mental illness", "mental handicap", "slow learner", etc or its use as an offensive?
I think the main issue is that no matter which word/phrase is used, some people will use it as a slur, and changing it so often causes more issues than it solves.
For what it’s worth, I’m not trying to be offensive or edgy when I say that word with friends. “The grass is green and that thing (random topic) is retarded.”
You know that many people are offended by that word and yet you use it anyway when other words would get the exact same message across without the offense. The only reasons to use that specific word are either the desire to cause offense or to revel in the possibility of causing offense.
If someone refers to themselves by a particular slur, that does not grant you any social leniency to call them that too. Consider that exact situation with any other particular slur.
I have not called musk redarded, i have called the idea retarded.
Same as master branch or master/slave communication idiocy. People that get this hung up really have too much free time on their hand, or have too much to gain in discussing language instead of discussing the actual problem.
For example: see how many commenters here are debating words instead of debating the validity of yet another hype-inducing value-pumping statement for clueless investors and fanboys.
On local fintech radio the week it was first announced they spent 3-4 days discussing the financial implication, then just one discussing the feasibility. Guess we're lucky we got one whole day of engineering discussing things for a change
Musk using a slur about himself doesn't grant permission for others to use it. Would monegator have used the n-word if Musk had used it to describe himself? Hopefully not. And let's be honest with each other: Musk says things like this for shock value, because it's not an acceptable word.
Space is an abysmal environment for running compute. It offers no real advantages over doing the same thing on Earth, and it's more expensive, too! Energy is far cheaper and more abundant here than in space. And get ready to figure out things like:
- Heat dissipation
- Radiation shielding
- Either the most complex in-space construction ever undertaken, or the most complex distributed computing problem ever undertaken (no, Starlink satellites aren't good enough, we're orders of magnitude away from replicating the speed and reliability of connections within a single room)
- Zero flexibility, zero repairability, zero upgradability. Either it's working, or you make it burn up in the atmosphere with no in-between. Add on that the rationality of sending mountains of precision-manufactured tech containing many uncommon metals only for them to be completely lost. This makes the pricing even worse, in addition to
- Already high costs for designing, building and launching all that in addition to all the extra weight overhead you're taking in components that don't do computation, when the alternative is building a glorified warehouse in the middle of nowhere.
It just doesn't make any sense. It's a project tied up in hype and created solely so spaceflight can be hastily duct taped to the AI investment hysteria. Ask yourself why no one brought this up before or outside the context of AI, despite the lowering of space launch prices and data centers both existing before any of it.
> why no one brought this up before or outside the context of AI
AI compute is different (slightly higher latency is fine for inference, and there's no issue for training), and there has never been so much backlash against data centers or other infrastructure buildout. If an increasingly-non-minority of politicians get their way it will in fact be cheaper and faster to get some servers shipped to space than it will be to get the permits and build it out here on earth.
Also, most Datacenter maintenance is just dealing with the problems you see with space- power and cooling. Solar is 5x better in space and a lot more consistent. Here on land they're shutting down nuclear and imposing so many new regulations on gas and coal (and now on solar and wind) that there aren't many grids that can support growth at the scale that's being requested.
Nobody is claiming that all compute is going to space, which is what you seem to think you're arguing against. There's high-dollar demand for it right now, so if we want to be multi-planetary it's the perfect time to start tackling the "compute in space" problem that needs to be solved. Or you need to prove to future people that "All compute can be forever located on Earth" which seems a lot harder sell.
But it'll have to start with Sinophobia so nobody wants to touch it. LEO objects are just such a non-issue that you'd have to really be grasping at straws (though the "Data centers will consumes earth's water" people can probably fall for it)
Assume reusable spaceflight eventually brings launch cost close to the cost of fuel. This is close to happening.
The overhead of building out grid and power infrastructure on land would then exceed the installation speed and cost relative to space based deployments.
Also assume the compute that does make it to space has a short shelf life anyways so lack of ability to repair is a non issue. As we scale manufacturing on land this will increasingly be the case.
China has already run experiments and served models from space, so we know the heat dissipation equation is solvable.
Finally you’d arrive at a similar model that’s already proven successful with Starlink but applied to serving inference.
The key question is speed to scale new deployments to meet demand. If the markets demand is near infinite, they will choose to fund space based deployments over slower land deployments.
That makes no sense to me. You've cited one overhead for building on land but just didn't bring up the billions of overheads for deploying satellites. The associated costs of launching this stuff into space blows the price of boring old power grid infrastructure out of the water, even with launch prices assumed to be the cheapest they can be. For instance, the extreme additional costs of equipping each payload with their individual systems of power generation, flight computers, maneuvering systems, structural components, communications infrastructure, heat dissipation hardware, radiation shielding and so much more. You have to pay the price in weight and money for all of these inefficient small-scale components for each unit launch, compared to plugging in an additional server rack and taking advantage of the economies of scale in a centralized data center that already solve all of these things. And that's before you get into the costs of designing, mass-producing and operating these things, compared to the costs of running a normal data center. And that thing about reusability that I mentioned also cuts into the margins. Data centers can keep working even if their hardware is a generation out of date, they can sell off old equipment, they can repair individual components instead of throwing out a whole rack. This is literally setting your GPUs on fire. It's just one more thing that makes it even more expensive.
Heat dissipation in space is possible, of course, but every kilogram you spend on heat is a kilogram you could've spent on something else. When you're talking about boxes that generate so much heat, you're going to need to spend a lot on that ancillary hardware in each unit that, again, makes it even less rational.
Then the concerns about megastructures or distributed computing go unanswered - to my knowledge, we simply don't have the technology for either of these right now. Starlink isn't close to solving it - the bandwidth of a Starlink satellite is nothing in comparison to the bandwidth of a single current-gen server GPU connection.
Energy is not cheaper on earth. Solar in space gets 24/7 power at a 30%+ rate vs the surface. Radiative cooling is passive and cheaper because there are no HVACs or chillers and high temperature chips reduce the need. The ISS does this already. Radiation really isn't a big issue with ECC and redundancy and optical links are fine for batch training.
The only hard part making the math work is the launch cost. They need reusable and reliable starship economics. If they hit that goal, it will become cheaper for pre-training, which is 70%+ of the budget for the frontier models.
> It offers no real advantages over doing the same thing on Earth
Abundant solar energy, free real estate, less regulation, less backlash from NIMBYs, simpler (yes) cooling.
> Energy is far cheaper and more abundant here than in space.
Huh? The sun is obviously the most abundant source of energy in the solar system.
Satellites in a dusk dawn sun synchronous orbit can be fully illuminated 24/7, so they receive ~6x more solar energy than panels on earth. They also don’t need batteries to operate 24/7, and the panels don’t need glass to deflect hail.
> Heat dissipation
Yes, it will require large radiators. They’re mechanically simpler than terrestrial cooling though.
> Radiation shielding
It turns out generative AI is somewhat uniquely robust to occasional bit flips.
- Either the most complex in-space construction ever undertaken, or the most complex distributed computing problem ever undertaken (no, Starlink satellites aren't good enough, we're orders of magnitude away from replicating the speed and reliability of connections within a single room)
It won’t be a single structure, and will only be used for inference, so latency between satellites/racks doesn’t matter.
- Zero flexibility, zero repairability, zero upgradability. Either it's working, or you make it burn up in the atmosphere with no in-between. Add on that the rationality of sending mountains of precision-manufactured tech containing many uncommon metals only for them to be completely lost. This makes the pricing even worse, in addition to
- Already high costs for designing, building and launching all that in addition to all the extra weight overhead you're taking in components that don't do computation, when the alternative is building a glorified warehouse in the middle of nowhere.
I think people vastly underestimate how much a fully reusable Starship will change the economics of space operations.
Not only the initial launch costs, but things like refueling and repairing satellites becomes more economical. I wouldn’t be surprise if SpaceX sends Starships to refuel/maintain satellites to keep them in orbit longer. In fact, SpaceX’s own animation shows modular servers sliding in and out of the satellites.
Space-grade photovoltaics are >10x more expensive than ground based panels. Add some (Tesla) utility scale batteries and it can run 24/7. No need for expensive radiators or rocket launches. And personnel can upgrade the hardware every time there's a new generation of GPU's.
Putting datacenters in deserts around the equator is a much better idea than in Space. If you're really optimizing for cost that is. If you're optimizing for SpaceX meme-stock valuation the former wins
A global centralized internet provider? I mean, just that, might be a trillion dollar company. Let alone build out datacenters? Those are not easy or cheap here on earth. You can build out datacenters at scale with minimal need for power or cooling. I think the current rate for a data center (not gpu) is 120million. Datacenters are super hip now too.
Elon has always been a Department of Defense/intelligence asset larping as a capitalists. You can't exactly go to congress and get a quarter of the government budget to do globe spanning surveillance from space, or convince them to let you fund, build and maintain a platform for psyopping your own civilian population (x) So you go get your illegal projects funded through capital markets with through an asset like Elon. As soon as the department of defense started focusing on subterranean warfare and how its the future of wars Elon starts a tunneling company.
Elon is just Howard Hughes v2, they're running the same script again.
Is the TAM for airlines finite? They ship an indefinitely growing volume of cargo and people. Reusable rockets will be no different. Cargo into space, people in point-to-point orbital flights and to Mars.
Not a sound argument because you would have said the same thing before they did Starlink. "The TAM for launch services is finite. There are only so many countries/companies that want to launch satellites."
Musk would argue infinite. They literally want to create offworld colonies, with everything that entails. Obviously it's crazy, but it beats the pants off more adtech.
I'm bullish on DC in space with laser links. The whole sentient sun/railgun on the moon... hey, go big or go home. I would have probably just asked MBS for money on that one, and renamed the railgun "the line (of ketamine)".
It’s insane enough to consider undertaking the risk of a moon or mars colony. But doing so with him as the sole load bearing link in your supply chain? What if mars turns out to be woke and you’re fed into a wood chipper like USAID?
Last week a 13 year old video of ceo of Ariane Airspace got popular on twitter. When asked about spacex and reusable rockets he said: "there are only 25 satellites launched a year, every year, and that’s not going to change"
Currently a single Starlink launch is 25 satellites. And there are 100 such launches a year.
If only the shareholders had any kind of voice - if only it was illegal to issue a fake IPO where you sell an overwhelming number of shares stripped of their voting power - if only the market responded rationally to this boondoggle.
If we're going to right the ship in turn of common sense a bunch of people need to lose a bunch of money, I just hope it doesn't mostly hit passive investors and instead lands mostly on Elon-stans.
If only you there were companies who could choose which type of shares they'd like to offer...and if only people could buy the types they want from the company that aligns with their ideas...
Passive "investors" can go and invest in ETF or whatever else that does not include company shares without voting rights.
How is it legal to have different share classes? You could make 100 shares that can vote and then sell 99.9% of the company while maintaining full control. Seems strongly against the spirit of a publicly traded company
I mean that just begs the question how we got to this point. And how far detached is the public market from real value. Many shares don’t confer actual value. Hell a lot of these companies don’t pay dividends in addition to very little or no voting rights.
Dividends are an interesting topic. There are sort of two ways to view the stock market - one is as a loan with a very drawn out repayment schedule that may be amicably adjusted for the health of the company (that one relies on two repayment strategies, dividends, buybacks and acquisitions). Once a company has issued stock the only two real reasons to care about the value is for the utility as a valuation tool which has steeply fallen off with indepth audits becoming the norm and, of course, further stock issuance - a healthy share price allows less dilution for further issuance. The other view of the stock market is just pure gambling - if you take away the disbursements and shareholder voting control then all that's left is the valuation which we can do better in different ways (and stock price is often disregarded when considering loans and M&A except when the difference can be arbitraged).
Really, it's kind of all meaningless BS, but as long as most people believe it isn't then it's a great way to grow assets by doing nothing which is an activity that we apparently want to encourage?
I wouldn’t see it as just pure gambling. I’m not a dividend queen that really cares all
That much about it. I do think we are sliding along the scale from shares having intrinsic value as an ownership stake in an income producing asset to collector cards that we track societies valuation of a company with. And at some point in the next 50 years shit will hit the fan. Unfortunately sitting it out isn’t really an option either
There's some companies (Snap being one of them) where certain classes of shares have NO voting rights. If you think SpaceX is lopsided, look at Snap's shares. They have A, B, and C class. The founders of Snap own 95% of the voting through their Class C shares... literally only pre-IPO folks have any voting rights.
Musk didn’t invent the idea of using multiple share classes to ensure the founder(s) retain control of the company, see Rupert Murdoch, Google, Facebook, etc
From the regulators’ perspective: it is a risk, but you disclosed that risk in the prospectus that buyers are assumed to have read (what percentage ever actually do?), hence it is fine
Well, when you buy into an IPO, they make you sign to say you read it. So either you did, or you made a false statement on a legal document
I suppose they kind of do, they could sell the stock and drive the price down. That wouldn't force Musk to change direction, but it would hurt his wealth.
If you have this much wealth in something as unpredictable as the stock market I think the very wise move is to start converting it into stock backed loans[1] that you leverage to buy real assets - buy islands and small countries, buy other successful large companies and just let them keep trending slowly upwards, pick up that New Zealand bunker... just try and get your money diversified and into things that would survive a stock price collapse. Even if Elon did this with 1% or 10% of his wealth and kept the vast majority of his assets invested in this one clump of companies and they went to zero he'd still be sitting on an insane pile of cash.
1. Lets all pour out a drink to the bankers who authorize such insane loan agreements.
With its IPO, SpaceX secured its role as the vehicle for consolidating Musk's vanity businesses into one closely held public organization that can more easily convert publicity into investment and internally reallocate funds and debts based on his personal whims.
So yes, SpaceX is pivoting, but it's to no one's surprise.
Buying Tesla is just buying SpaceX. When they roll up Tesla, it will be in a stock deal not real money. None of this is real money and I would argue that Musk is not the world's first trillionaire because there is no reality in which he could get that money out of SpaceX
I mean, if he wanted to sell tomorrow, who COULD spend $2-3 Trillion to buy it, and who WOULD? Anyone with that kind of money to spend today knows what a scam it is
Sure, it's reasonably likely they merge at some point but the ratio between the prices at that time will be different than the current ratio, so it still matters which share you buy today.
Especially since Musk is heavily incentivised to merge them at a price favourable to spacex since he has a much larger share
Musk may not have a few billions liquid on his cashing account, but he have something better: collateral to raise a few billions for everything he may want.
I mean as far as I know no human being is even a billionaire anyway if you only count cash. It's one of the things the "eat the rich" crowd is particularly bad at internalizing, that there's a difference between value and money that can be spent on food or hospitals.
It is much more feasible for Jeff Bezos to sell a billion dollars worth of Amazon tomorrow or Bill Gates to sell a billion dollars worth of MSFT tomorrow than it is for Elon to sell a trillion dollars of SPCX even over a year's time
I get that net worth is more than just cash, and that is not what I meant and it's pretty obvious that isn't what I meant. It may not just be cash on hand but if an asset is completely illiquid at it's purported value, is it actually worth that?
It is, because of the time component of money. Money is a way of storing the value of labor in a manner less affected by time. If you sell it all at once, its value is greatly reduced. All investments include that time component. Point-in-time net worth doesn't have much value as a measurement in part because of this.
Somewhat doubtful. (The first part of your statement, anyway. Of course the difference between abstract "value" and hard, spendable "money" is a thing.)
Like Mr. Hanson said in my sibling comment, some rulers are (or were!) bound to have amassed incredible amounts of resources. For historical/non-present-day examples, consider looking into figures like Jakob Fugger or Mansa Musa.
I have no idea why the adjusted net worth of people who died centuries ago would have anything to do with money in the modern day. And at a glance, neither of your examples had billions of dollars in cash, which is the point I was making. They may have had a lot of value tied up in illiquid investments, which is exactly like Musk's valuation.
Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model. Probably the best data available outside Anthropic and OpenAI. Coding models are seen by the leaders in AI as both the biggest current revenue opportunity and the best way to accelerate the progress of AI and bring about recursive self-improvement that will create superintelligence. So yeah, it's easy to see how SpaceX could see it as in their interest to purchase Cursor with 2% of their equity.
Mars was never going to happen without revenue. Starlink is providing revenue but probably not enough to build a whole city on Mars within our lifetimes. SpaceX needs more and AI is the only near-term way.
> Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model.
Ok. So what prevents a company from offering a Claude Code/ Cursor equivalent, with 100% subsidised Claude (= 100% free), capturing the exact same data that Cursor does? If the data is worth in the tens of billions, the cost of subsidising the usage is negligible.
Cursor also has a large customer base including most of the Fortune 500, talent, and their own coding model and training infrastructure using their data. You wouldn't get those automatically by subsidizing Claude, and the many months or even years it would take to ramp up your own IDE/coding hardness from scratch and acquire customers to match Cursor would put you way behind in a field where the SOTA climbs every month. It's also not clear that Anthropic would let you undercut everyone else using their API; they could cut you off at any time. That would be a very precarious position.
The video explains that it is spelled out in the prospectus that SpaceX is counting 70%-80% of their total addressable market to be AI related and only about 7%-8% to be space-related.
I saw that too, and it's so depressing. SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species, and to see it being reduced to a 7-8% "side-quest" :-(
> was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species
I don't think they were. All the Mars stuff is just dressed up version of The Boring Company - a distraction by Elon to better position his other interests.
There's no money in going to Mars and there's no reason to, from a financial perspective, and Elon doesn't care about anything beyond wealth and power.
Safari isn't even open source, and Chrome has never been a fork of Safari.
But yes Blink definitely started as a Webkit fork, and everyone would have found that laughable if someone bought that a proprietary fork of Webkit for $60B.
Cursor's Composer 2.5 is one of the few models out there focusing on coding, which is the one thing most of us here want. It's pretty good! It's not near frontier level insight generating genius, but it's regarded as very capable and trustable, and is indeed a lot better than previous Kimi. It'll be interesting to compare it versus Kimi 2.7 Code, which just dropped, which is also notably a coding specifical model. I'm expecting we'll see more of this over time and I think it has huge rewards, and Composer 2.5 is early proof.
I'm not super concerned about the spend to train the model, especially given that Kimi was famously incredibly cheaply made, and given what they are competing with. I don't think that's a meaningful concern.
Reciprocally, and in far more important relevant in my humble opinion: in terms of cost to run models: Composer 2.5 is easily one of the cheapest models out there. It's fantastically cheap. It's token efficiency is through the roof astronomical. I think this training for a coding specific model has yielded something incredibly special here, and I hope SpaceXLAIC isn't the only company doing this.
However it definitly isn't _just_ Kimi. The weight will be different after that 85% of extra training on top of the base model.
If those different weights are better are worse doesn't change that it's in most meaningful ways not the same as the base one.
I would encourage you to lookup their blog posts about their post training process if you want a bit more faith that they aren't running an extra 85% of compute and burning money with no-ops.
I don't think it's all no-ops. Still don't think it's a particularly relevant model/company/product.
I'll defer the reading until I see signal that they have something worthwhile. I've watched a couple interviews and used the product, neither of which impressed me.
>One of the things that makes @SpaceX
so valuable is how valuable it is. The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX’s high valuation.
They are buying it with overvalued stocks, so it isn't real money. Probably the Cursor team will be able to sell it when the SpaceX stocks will be already crashed.
Why are you comparing it to building expensive modern hospitals? Why don't you compare every other tech acquisition to that? because that's not a relevant comparison, and building expensive modern hospitals has nothing to do with the goal of for-profit corporations.
SpaceX has 3 major businesses: Space, Starlink, and AI.
This is the same straw man argument of "country Z has N homeless/unhoused people, why are they building a space/military/education widget for $Y price, when they haven't found homes for N unhoused people yet?"
It's not like they could easily cash out all of those $60B. I always find it troublesome that we generally conflate cash with stonks, market caps, and such.
> It's not like they could easily cash out all of those $60B.
They probably have a vesting period of some sort (as they would with cash as well) but beyond that they will definitely be able to cash out all of their money as soon as they are allowed to.
$60B is 3% of SpaceX at today's valuation, Musk had no issue selling this amount of Tesla shares to buy Twitter. The idea that stocks are somehow not liquid is an nonsensical urban legend.
Elon is consolidating all of his property into one single megacorporation because he is confident that nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States.
> the current political direction of the United States
These kinds of comments reek echo-chamber parroting and zero substantive research. As someone that very much enjoys and carefully follows politics, the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms, effectively turning Trump's administration into a 2-year lame duck. What are you even talking about?
Obviously you're trying to be snarky, but I hope you realize that Congress does, in fact, have (fairly broad) statutory authority over executive agencies[1].
Can it change? Yes. That's not the same question as will it change. And that is also not the same question as "will the change result in a different posture towards antitrust."
When was the last time substantive antitrust action was taken that forcefully restructured a large company to a significant degree?
And I hope you realize that while Congress has authority over a lot of things, that authority is being routinely overridden by the current presidential administration, including fundamental things like spending and declaring war.
So it comes across as a bit foolish to assume that any Congressional authority actually exists, or will continue to exist into the future, since we have many examples now of where that authority seemingly doesn't matter anymore.
Especially since the majority of Congress is in the same party as the current President, and is making no effort not to cede congressional authority to the executive branch.
Congress isn't being overridden at all. Congress has the power and authority to rein in Trump whenever they want. They are choosing not to, because congress is controlled by the Republican party, and the Republican party is currently ducktaped to Donald Trump himself, and even barely delaying anything Trump wants gets you primaried.
But mostly they are fine with what's happening so they have no desire to stop him.
One of the things I find really interesting as a Brit is hard to put into words:
Americans tell us that we don't have a constitution — when we do, it is just not wholly written down. (It is in part).
We have a constitution that is flexible and precedent-based, but pretty stable, and it has emerged on top of the bits that are written down, and has amended them over time (for example, it is built in part on Magna Carta, but only two or three of its principles remain in law.) Notably a bit more of it got written when we agreed to be bound by the ECHR, but that was mostly absorbed into our understanding.
It has taken us hundreds of years to get to this stability, and it is defended from attack from pretty much all sides; every government risks changing it and there is pushback each time, because you can't govern if there aren't rules. The rules are precedent and convention, and there are various authorities and archives that are consulted to work out what they are if people think they are at risk.
We are regularly told by Americans that this is an intolerable thing; we need a written constitution or we can't know what our rights are!
But those same Americans, right now, are engaged in exactly this process. You have a set of written rules that give Congress power over things, and you are currently evolving a set of precedents that suggest that the executive can simply wander past them and Congress somehow shows deference or refuses to assert its power in some situations.
You're right at the start of building an uncodified constitution on top of the old one just as we did on top of Magna Carta.
It's not entirely new to Trump; every President in my lifetime has pushed on this except maybe Carter. And sometimes they push back (Roe v. Wade was part of this uncodified constitution and probably needed to be a written amendment.)
It could work out but it's important to understand that is what you're doing. And it's not just Unitary Executive theory or presidential immunity; the emergence of the Supreme Court's "shadow docket" is emblematic of the same process.
We had Boris Johnson and Liz Truss; the fact they happened at all demonstrates our system still has vulnerabilities.
I’m no fan of venerating a written constitution either, but I have an anxiety about parliamentary-sovereignty: events like Brexit and BoJo demonstrate a need for something to bind parliament, lest we get a 21st century Oswald Mosley. Right now we have… decorum and monarchy: a firewall made of damp serviettes.
Prior to Brexit, I feel there was some (if vague) kind of accountability from parliament to the EU - which is why/how Brexit revealed the fault-line in the Tories that split the proto-fash types from the amoral-business types to give us Reform/Restore today, and they’re uncomfortably popular. So what I’m saying is that Brexit weakened our accountability mechanisms more than people realize as the national-conversation focused only on economic impact and immigration.
In summary: do not convince yourself that “it cannot happen here”; nor that current safeguards (if any) are sufficient.
Oh I am not convincing myself at all. Like I say, every government ultimately ends up risking it and getting yanked back by the Commons (or the Lords in the case of e.g. 42 day detention of terror suspects, various other bad overconfident schemes like ID cards).
It's a pattern, a cycle. It is always under a sort of measured level of threat. But it is largely stable because at any time the party in power always has an iconoclast (Heseltine, Cook, Davies etc.) who is willing to get in the way, and there is essentially a Commons (or Lords) tradition of making sure that person gets heard.
And because the Prime Minister isn't really that special — just the loudest voice in his party, subject to its back-stabbing — there is a pattern to their failure, too.
(There is a bit of a concern that we're getting too used to them not lasting more than a couple of years, but I do get rather frustrated at the both-sidesing that is including Starmer with a run of utter inadequates from the other side)
Again the point I was making was only that the USA is getting a little further down the line towards wrapping up the clarity of the written Constitution with a layer of yes-but convention... It gets a lot more difficult from here.
There is a narrow window to pull it back, but as much as I think they are for the rule of law, I don't think the Democrats, even with potential rule-of-law-asshole injections like George Conway, are truly prepared to hew that close to the Constitution themselves.
Even if Congress may reverse things in the future, there are many opportunistic things happening right now, and it seems like the spacex situation is one of them. The emerging picture feels like a 'flood the zone' strategy (not by coordination, but by practical effect).
While other commenters have pointed out lots of details that point towards the favorable structural environment going forward, another idea that roots my thoughts towards this is that by creating facts on the ground, they are defining the new starting point.
Ultimately, reversing all of the different 'wrongs' or irregularities will be costly to both the opposition's political and attentional capital.
> the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms
Even if so, are the Democrats really going to do the house cleaning required to fix this? Their recent history implies that they'll try to pretend things are running normally, until it all explodes in their face (again). Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll actually fight for the country, but... I'm not surprised that companies (and markets) are expecting them to just... not.
Brother I'm not clear there will be a midterm election and I'm confident most of the electorate on both sides feel very disenfranchised voting and suspect the system is not working on the level.
Going to do my best to respond to this while still following the HN guidelines:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
RIMR says:
> nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States
It's obviously hyperbole to say that NOBODY will EVER challenge this, but I'd say it's directionally correct:
1. The Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative, pro-big-business majority that makes it very difficult for any legal attempts to challenge Elon's actions to survive litigation.
2. The United States Senate has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due its over-representation of rural voters and its internal norms (filibuster)
3. The United States House has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the gerrymandering efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country (which the Democrats have tried to counter and failed, see Virginia)
4. The conservative, pro-big-business Supreme Court has ensured that elections in the United States overall have a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the unfettered spending allowed after Citizens United.
So yes, the winds seems to be against Republicans and Trump in the mid-terms, but the structural biases of the government are still very much pro-big-business, pro-capital, and anti-regulation.
It will take much more than a single mid-term cycle to reverse that trend.
> the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms,
I am not this optimistic and I think it is dangerous to be this optimistic. Even putting aside mischief, just as a matter of reality, the gap always closes. A loss, yes. Hopefully. A slap around the face, maybe. Perhaps enough to get a clear win in the House. A pummelling? Nah. I think they might still keep the Senate.
Trump supporters falling out of love for him could well just lead them to focus their attention on down-ticket Republicans who figure out how to make them feel OK about their past choices, and since they need to feel OK, they will come out. Wholesale rejection of the party is unlikely since it is already splitting into two factions.
is spacex a space company? I thought they were an internet provider that wants to use their strategic advantages to get into AI including AI infra like data centers.
SpaceX since the IPO is an AI company with two side projects: social networks and space.
I say this based on their filing which says that the vast majority of predicted profits will come from their AI company, citing a $36.5T total addressable market.
SpaceX isn't a space company anymore, it's an AI company. In their IPO filing, of their projected $28T total addressable market, only $370B (~1-2%) of that is from space [1]. The rest is primarily AI, with a sprinkling of Telecom revenue from Starlink.
Given xAI's Grok is way behind ChatGPT & Claude on coding capabilities, whereas Cursor was able to get in spitting distance of them w/ Composer 2.5 by simply running post-training on Kimi K2.5, I'm not sure Elon could dream up a more perfect strategic fit.
Cursor likely has the largest, highest quality dataset of any private firm for training new coding models, which would compete SpaceX's trifecta of becoming a viable competitor in the AI race:
1. Access to compute (they have so much that they're renting capacity to Anthropic & Google)
2. Liquidity for R&D+M&A (largest IPO in history)
3. High quality training data (this Cursor acquisition)
> Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else?
In a vacuum, absolutely yes. But in the bizarre context of the AI economics, chaotically scrambling to bring everything you need to compete in-house makes perfect sense.
Arguably, when compared with either OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, SpaceX/xAI now own the most compute, are the most financially liquid, and (assuming the Cursor acquisition goes through) have the largest corpus of high quality training data.
We may very well be a couple of months away from a Grok release that goes toe-to-toe w/ other American frontier models, IMHO.
So when you look at this as a $60B play to capture an additional 10-20% of an estimated $26T total addressable market, it makes a lot more sense. Now, whether that projected TAM is even remotely close to reality (or even just enough to make Cursor worth $60B) is another question entirely.
No, it really still makes no sense. Where's the moat around what Cursor provides? If Cursor is really that great, surely something equally great could be developed for a measly $1 billion or so? Is it brand recognition? An established customer base? Surely they don't have $60 billion worth of either.
The key point I think you're missing is Cursor's "moat" isn't around their product or brand, it's around the gigantic corpus of usage data they've almost certainly collected.
It is simply not feasible train an LLM to be as good as these frontier models are without a TON of high-quality examples of what "good" looks like. Every time a Cursor user (who didn't opt out of analytics) does/doesn't hit a "retry" button, or rejects/accepts an LLMs output, it allows Cursor to log record of a specific LLMs output and a binary signal of that output's quality.
Given they've been at this since 2022, and for most of that time sat comfortably at #1 in market share among comparable AI coding tools (only recently getting topped by Claude code), Cursor likely has the largest, highest-quality, SWE-specific dataset in the industry by a sizable margin.
Grok being so late to the party could only train on twitter data in combination with whatever they could source publicly or purchase privately, and likely hasn't had anywhere near the usage they'd need to build up their own competitive dataset from scratch anytime soon.
If you believe (as SpaceX seems to) that the AI's total addressable market is over $26T, and acquiring proprietary, high-quality training data is the difference between capturing ~1-2% of that market and ~10-20%, then $60B starts to look like a bargain.
>they have so much that they're renting capacity to Anthropic & Google
they could not make use of it! That's why they're renting, they don't have access to good distributed training software, so the heterogenous cluster they made was bad for training and they don't have enough demand for inference.
>Arguably, when compared with either OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, SpaceX/xAI now own the most compute,
lol wut. You think they have more compute than Google?
> are the most financially liquid,
You think they have the most cashflow?
>the largest corpus of high quality training data.
What? You think they have higher quality training data than Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI?
>We may very well be a couple of months away from a Grok release that goes toe-to-toe w/ other American frontier models, IMHO.
Training on what? They rented both of their data centers away!!!
Grok 4.3 was made on Colossus 1? It's not frontier quality, but it's definitely not nothing. Also, Cursor brings more expertise to help them improve their utilization further.
Additionally, I struggle to see how renting out excess capacity is anything but good. It brings in a ton of cash at a price premium, and ensures they have headroom to gradually phase out rental capacity as their internal demand increases.
> You think they have more compute than Google?
Fair point. No way they have more raw compute, but I do think it'd be fair to say they have more "excess compute capacity" than Google, but even that is pretty speculative.
> You think they have the most cashflow?
Again fair point. I was overestimating how much cash comes from a $2T IPO before actually looking at the numbers. My revised take is that SpaceX/xAI are now in-line with the other labs on cash liquidity, rather than leading (where pre-IPO they were way behind)
> You think they have higher quality training data than Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI?
Yes -- I'm standing by this one. Cursor has a multi-year head start on agentic coding data collection, and a GUI UX that likely provides richer user sentiment & quality signals than something like Claude Code.
Obviously OpenAI & Anthropic have far larger proprietary datasets for chat histories, and Google is an undisputed leader in data hoarding. But when it comes to agentic coding specifically (AI's most compelling use-case, IMO), I think Cursor's data is a HUGE deal. This is backed up by how good Composer 2.5 was given it was essentially Kimi K2.5 + Cursor data.
Additionally, I also suspect its possible to mine Twitter for user engagement & sentiment analysis to create surprisingly useful datasets.
> Training on what? They rented both of their data centers away!!!
I thought they only rented Colossus 1, but you're right they're also renting out a portion of Colossus 2. That said, they still have 2/3 of their Colossus 2 facility available for internal, which is likely enough to build something competitive. They also have 90-day termination agreements in place once they forecast a need for more internal capacity.
All that said, while I appreciate your pushback & I was overly hyperbolic on a few key points in my last comment, I stand by my core theses: The Cursor acquisition (assuming it goes through) combined with the SpaceX IPO puts xAI/Grok right in-line with the other big labs, at least in terms of positioning.
Whether they're able to execute remains to be seen, but I would not at all surprised to see a frontier-quality Grok 5 or Composer 3 release before the end of the year.
Because cursor gets some of the highest quality training data from the world's programmers and responses from the full ecosystem of model vendors and access to active code bases. XAI wants the data.
Perhaps that's where the money and strategy is. (a) stronger need; (b) if you can build systems without real expertise, you don't have to stomach their salaries or politics.
Umm. It’s real development work in real settings with real model output. That is a high quality dataset. The fact that it isn’t good code from elite engineers is confusing what good means in the context of coding agents. First is how to respond to a range of prompts. For that you need diverse real world conversations. Second is the ability to respond with good code. That is about labeling or other data curation after the fact or other training methods. So it’s a downstream consideration
Since Cursor is kind of a Select-Your-Model front end for various AI coding systems, how much of it could be to just make sure Grok gets to the top or default choice of that Select-Your-Model list?
How is buying a company sending messages on the Internet for $45b in the owner's interest when Westinghouse, who built nuclear reactors sold for under $10b? The market is irrational.
It might not be irrational if there is more revenue in people who are willing to spend money on internet messages than there are on those willing to spend for nuclear reactors.
So far, I see way more companies paying each other in a circular fashion than individuals forking out anything near whatever tam SpaceX is projecting for AI.
I think it has something to do with the fact that the first company is better at spreading messages on the Internet than the other at building reactors.
when you see the list of major investors in Cursor that will never break even if it stays independent, and compare it to the investors in SpaceX, it all makes sense.
Hardly the fault of anyone is it for not reading a 100+page document meant for investors when it literally in the name .
If they don’t want us to think of them as a Space company they could have taken the xAI name (like how grammarly did with superhuman) or called it Musk Inc or whatever else.
I mean, the answer is obvious if you do not deliberately try to put a message in the worst light possible:
- "Space company" has a major LLM+datacenter business called X.ai.
- LLM for coding is a big business, as you can see from trillion dollar valuations of Anthropic.
- Cursor is popular and gives you a headstart on the business.
- Instagram was bought for the price of many many hospitals. Uber is more valuable than companies owning the cars. Different business models, entirely different valuation models. Not sure what that comparison entails. You know it. I know it.
Whether it is a good purchase or not, we may not know, but we know your characterization is just outright dismissal without much rationale behind it.
Part of Elon Musks strategy seems to sell some kind of hype that does not materialise or at least won't for long (Mars, autonomous Cars) The vast amounts of money collected are then used to develop products that are still a significant progress in its market. Now AI is where all the hype is. It's difficult to sell some hype without AI currently.
I bought a small amount (4 shares) of SpaceX stock on IPO day for $160/share. This Cursor purchase does not upset me as a very minor shareholder. Elon Musk seems to have a unique ability to help grow companies that lead to shareholder value. In particular, it seems that xAI overbuilt data centers because their model fell behind. SpaceX could lease data center capacity to Google or other big players (which they're doing), or they can use it internally. Buying Cursor lets them do it internally.
My employer recently switched us all from Cursor to Claude Code. Aside from my personal preference for having a chat window inside VSCode, Claude Code is painfully slow compared to Cursor for my workloads. I think part of this is due to Claude's massive bump in popularity without a similarly rapid build-out of compute. So, the low-hanging fruit for Cursor is to have a massive speed advantage over Claude Code and regain popularity that way. (My current paid AI subscriptions are ChatGPT, Gemini and Cursor. I do not personally pay for Claude.)
And as far as the pivot goes, there seems to be speculation that Elon Musk wishes to roll up all his companies into one big company. So, it doesn't really matter if the AI company lives inside SpaceX or Tesla, since it'll all be one big thing in the future.
> bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else
SPACx designs, manufactures, and launches the world's most advanced ponzis on pyramids. The company will be re-founded every year by Xlon Tusk to revolutionize capitalism, with the ultimate goal of making market multilevel.
spacX has gained VC attention for a series of web3 milestones: It is the only AI company ever to run a 1000B-A3000-Thinkkking on low-Cost toasters, which it first accomplished in May 1945. Grokipedia made history again when its ClosedAI attached to Moonshot Kimi, exchanged token payloads, and returned Alignment to money — a deeply challenging feat previously accomplished only by Cursor 60B. Since then it has distilled cargo to and from Moonshot multiple times, providing regular RL missions for Goog.
SpaceX is just a vibe company. Nothing they are doing makes sense on a valuation basis, which their investors are eventually going to painfully figure out.
I’m worried all this crap will distract and damage the things they are great at (rockets) similar to what happened to Tesla where outside the stock price it’s pretty dismal
SpaceX’s interest is being an Enterprise AI corporation, they identified it as a $24 trillion addressable market, in comparison to their quarter trillion rocket related one
It’s all disclosed in the S-1, you read it right?
In America all you have to do is tell potential investors what you’re doing, its up to the people to use their discretion afterwards
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisiti...