"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
And so it began. The seed was sent into space. All going according to plan.
xAI joins SpaceX
481–490 of 1001 posts
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#482A 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…
"Technically challenging", a nice way to say "impossible"
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#483Whenever computer chips go into space, they have to be hardened against radiation, because there is no atmosphere to protect them. Otherwise you get random bit flips. This process takes a while, which is partly why all the computers in space seem out of date. Because they are. No one is going to want to use chips that are a many years out of date or subject to random bit flips. (Although now it got me thinking, do ra…
not a problem for "AI". it's just a bit more spice (temperature) which Grok possibly need! jk!
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> And not delivering products 2024 revenue of >$100b is quite impressive for not delivering any products
What kind of nonsense is that. SpaceX 2024 revenue barely broke $10B, if that. Launch was probably ~$4B and Starlink probably ~$5B. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and double those just for shits and giggles and that's still less than $20B and you're claiming >$100B? Horse shit. Nonsense.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#485I asked Gemini for a two word summary and it wrote "financial engineering"
Grok: Integrated Ambition
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#486As a SpaceX fan, I am saddened by this news. The only reason for xAI to join SpaceX is to offload Elon's Twitter debt in the upcoming IPO.
This is just what I was thinking. Twitter (X) owed $1.3B in debt every year in interest since Musk's takeover. This was before re-financing in a higher interest rate environment. The company was losing $200MM+ per year on ~$5B in revenue before the takeover, and there are reports that revenues have decreased by round 50%. Best case scenario if we accept those numbers is that X makes $3B per year and about half of tha…
> The company was losing $200MM+ per year on ~$5B in revenue before the takeover, and there are reports that revenues have decreased by round 50%.
X made a profit last year because they cut costs lower than the drop in ad revenue (which is also slowly recovering). The big question is if they will still be profitable in 2026 year without the US election driving big traffic numbers and ads.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
See Dyson Sphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Yeah, that's the point ... it's stupid to believe humanity is capable of deploying that much infrastructure. We cannot do even 0.01% of it.
What do you think the limiting factor is? I don't see why we can't scale manufacturing of satellites up as far as we want. If we mine out a substantial fraction of the mass of the earth, we can go harvest asteroids or something.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#488From 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
I think the argument is that it's messed up that a large debt swap from xAI kept Musk's margin on Twitter from being called by his investors, and now that debt is being absorbed by SpaceX.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#489From 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?
Who is SpaceX’s biggest customer? And which industry are we being told by any number of governments around the world is the most importantly thing ever and must be subsidized and forced on people?
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX due to Tesla being a public company, so his hands are tied. Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US. Most people just want affordable, maintainable and reliable cars.
> Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX due to Tesla being a public company, so his hands are tied. He absolutely could do it, just like he did when Tesla bought SolarCity. It just isn’t as easy when one of the companies is public than when both are private.
Tesla to invest $2B in Elon Musk’s xAI
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tesla-invested-2b-in-elon-...