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xAI joins SpaceX

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Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#461

Post by kibibu »

RIMR wrote: post #356

This means that Grok, Elon's politically labotomized involuntary pornography generator, and X (formerly Twitter), Elon's Nazi-adjacent propaganda machine, are now completely intertwined with SpaceX, a too-big-to-fail government contractor that currently serves as America's only reliable option for manned orbital spaceflight. Anyone who doesn't see how broken this situation is isn't paying attention. This is how peopl…

Seems more risky to me; it takes only one Mercurial temper swing for SpaceX to be nationalized, and now Twitter and xAI are bundled along with it.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#462

Post by jmyeet »

When does the market realize this is all just a shell game and the emperor really has no clothes?

We saw this on a much smalelr scale a decade ago when one of Elon's companies (Tesla) acquired a second one of Elon's companies (SolarCity) because it was broke and owed a ton of money to a third one of Elon's companies (SpaceX).

Elon was forced to go through with his impulsive Twitter acquisition by a Delaware court, an acquisition that was not only secured by a bunch of Tesla stock but also a bunch of Qatari and Saudi royal money. He then mismanaged Twitter so badly Fidelity wrote down its value by at least 80% [1].

So what did Elon do? Raised even more questionable foreign money into xAI, diverted GPUs intended for another of his companies (Tesla) into Twitter and then "merged" Twitter into xAI, effectively using other people's money to bail him out from an inevitable margin call on his Tesla stock.

Interestingly, Twitter was reportedly valued at $33 billion in this deal [2], significantly more than the less than $10 billion Fidelity valued Twitter at. Weird, huh? With a competent government, this would be securities fraud that would have you spend the rest of your life in jail. And even with all that, $11 billion was lost on the deal.

So here we are and it's time for the shell game to be played again. Now it's SpaceX's turn to bail out the xAI investors.

And what is the argument for all this? AI data centers in space. Words cannot describe how little sense this makes. Launch costs (even if the Starship launch costs get to their rosy projections), cooling in space, cosmic rays (and the resulting errors) and maintenance. Servers constantly need parts replaced. You can just deorbit the satellite instead but that seems like an expensive way of dealing with a bad SSD or RAM chip.

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...

[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/elon-musk-says-xai-has-acqui...

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#463

Post by n_u »

A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging:

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...

I don't have any specialized knowledge of the physics but I saw an article suggesting the real reason for the push to build them in space is to hedge against political pushback preventing construction on Earth.

I can't find the original article but here is one about datacenter pushback:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-08-20/ai-and...

But even if political pushback on Earth is the real reason, it still seems datacenters in space are extremely technically challenging/impossible to build.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#464

Post by yeukhon »

alpha_squared wrote: post #303

The really skeptical take here is that eventually all of Musk's companies merge, or at least the biggest ones, for juicing that market value to get that $1T payout. Looking at Tesla.

Then he will spin off and then remerge again. He has several more small companies before he plays that game. Maybe next quarter!

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#465

Post by ginko »

DontBreakAlex wrote: post #255
DoctorOetker wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what makes you believe this? radiators can be made as long as desirable within the shade of the solar panels, hence the designer can pracitically set arbitrarily low temperatures above the background temperature of the universe.

Radiators can only be made as long as desirable because there's gravity for the fluid inside to go back down once it condenses. Even seen those copper heat pipes in your PC radiator?

Fluid in heat pipes moves through capillary action.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#466

Post by woah »

eduardogarza wrote: post #435

From the Big Short (movie) Jared Vennett (narration): "In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agency's executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries." "Just kidding. Banks took the money the American people gave them, and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby…

It's messed up that Grok underwrote all those subprime mortgages in 2008

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#467

Post by 0xy »

eduardogarza wrote: post #435

From the Big Short (movie) Jared Vennett (narration): "In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agency's executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries." "Just kidding. Banks took the money the American people gave them, and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby…

Where's the government bailout in this transaction that would make this a relevant comparison?

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#468

Post by taurath »

n_u wrote: post #463

A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri... I don't have any specialized knowledge of the physics but I saw an article suggesting the real reason for the push to build them in space is to hedge against political pushback pr…

We don’t even have a habitable structure in space when the ISS falls, there is no world in which space datacenters are a thing in the next 10, I’d argue even 30 years. People really need to ground themselves in reality.

Edit: okay Tiangong - but that is not a data center.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#469

Post by dmix »

eduardogarza wrote: post #435

From the Big Short (movie) Jared Vennett (narration): "In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agency's executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries." "Just kidding. Banks took the money the American people gave them, and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby…

SpaceX is a private company

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#470

Post by crote »

bastawhiz wrote: post #330
moeadham wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, solar cells can be about 5x more efficient in space (irradiance, uptime).

And how much of that power would be spent on high speed communications with Earth that aren't, you know, a megabit or two per second

That's pretty much a solved problem. We've had geostationary constellations for TV broadcast at hundreds of megabytes for decades now, and lasers for sat-to-sat comms seems to be making decent progress as well.
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