What's to stop president AOC from pulling the clearances of everyone working for SpaceX?
xAI joins SpaceX
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#572When Elon Musk talks about benefiting humanity, remember that the one time he had unregulated power (DOGE) he used it mostly to cut benefits for poor people, and to push ideological agendas. His only agenda is self-aggrandizement, and this announcement is cover for passing the hot potato of Twitter debt around.
Whenever Elon, Anthropic or whoever mentions humanity, they don’t mean every 8 billion of us on Earth. They mean themselves, their mates and whoever they deem worthy of the posterity they believe only they have the merit to design.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#573From 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
Step 1: Merge xAI and SpaceX
Step 2: IPO SpaceX
Step 3: Merge Tesla and SpaceX x xAI (which would have been tricky if they were still private).
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#574Don't forget to opt out of SpaceX's product Starlink using your data to train AI: https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-wants-your-data-for-ai-m...
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#575What's to stop president AOC from pulling the clearances of everyone working for SpaceX?
SpaceX launches about 60% of National Security Space Launch payloads. The only other active launcher cleared for these missions is ULA's Vulcan Centaur, which has launched 3 times total, ~once every 8 months.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As far as I understand they did not make a profit in 2025. They posted positive adjusted EBITDA, which is not the same.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#577A 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.
> We don’t even have a habitable structure in space
Silicon is way more forgiving than biology. This isn’t an argument for this proposal. But there is no technical connection between humans in space and data centers other than launch-cost synergies.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#578> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon. edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial…
Context missing. This is in reference to a vision the (distant?) future where the satellites are manufactured in factories on the Moon and sent into space with mass drivers. Full paragraph quote comes from: > While launching AI satellites from Earth is the immediate focus, Starship’s capabilities will also enable operations on other worlds. Thanks to advancements like in-space propellant transfer, Starship will be ca…
Why would satellites be manufactured on the moon? There's nothing on the moon. The raw materials would have to be ferried over first. What would be the point?
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#579SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security. I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.
> SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security
So was GM. Didn’t stop it from going bankrupt.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#580> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon. edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial…
We also shouldn't overlook the fact that the proposal entirely glosses over the implication of the alternative benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of space AI happen. Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude an…
So what are the other things? You said he glossed over them and didn't mention a single one.