Kind of a bad look - but I can't precisely say why. Maybe he thinks he can raise more capital this way than he could for each company separately? Especially raising more money for X might be quite hard - they seem to be quite a bit behind on the revenue side compared to OpenAI / Anthropic. With both companies merged he might just find enough retail investors willing to buy at sky high valuations.
xAI joins SpaceX
61–70 of 1001 posts
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#62> SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend…
So he doesn't want to go to mars he wants to make a big space chatbot?
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#63Well surely this acquisition is above board. Nothing funny going on here, just good old business as usual.
What's funny? Do you think the investors are against this? The investor's aren't idiots. I imagine the typical investor in Elon Musk's companies would approve of this sort of thing. So what's the problem? Besides, its a private company with Musk as majority shareholder in both. That's the beauty of private companies, you can just do things. I wish more companies were private and ambitious. I'm tired of companies like…
> What's funny? Do you think the investors are against this? The investor's aren't idiots.
Any proof of that?
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#64I still don't understand the "data center in space" narrative. How are they going to solve the cooling issue?
Cooling a datacenter in space isn't really any harder than cooling a starlink in space, the ratio of solar panels to radiating area will have to be about the same. There is nothing uniquely heat-producing about GPUs, ultimately almost all energy collected by a satellite's solar panels ends up as heat in the satellite. IMO the big problem is the lack of maintainability.
Sure, but cooling a starlink in space is a lot more difficult than cooling a starlink on earth would be. And unlike starlink which absolutely must be in space in order to function, data centers work just fine on the ground.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#65They must have linked the wrong press release /s. I would have expected a press release about SpaceX acquiring xAI to talk about why they did that. Or at least mention xAI beyond the first paragraph. This is just Elon talking about space data centers
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#66Well surely this acquisition is above board. Nothing funny going on here, just good old business as usual.
> Well surely this acquisition is above board. What makes you think it isn’t?
Musk is notorious for shuffling assets across his companies to make some financials look better. For example, shuffling Twitter servers (and then all of Twitter) under xAI.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#67Why?
These are no longer tech companies, to they are financial, and power, instruments of the billionaire class
> These are no longer tech companies, to they are financial, and power, instruments of the billionaire class
SpaceX has made numerous breakthroughs in reusable launch vehicles, human spaceflight, satellite constellation, and rocket propulsion.
SpaceX is the world's dominant space launch provider with its launch cadence eclipsing all others, including private and national programs.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#68I still don't understand the "data center in space" narrative. How are they going to solve the cooling issue?
Remember MoviePass, and how they were losing gobs of money by letting people see unlimited movies for $20/month?
It was so obviously stupid that a bunch of people went, "well, this so clearly can't work that they must have a secret plan to make money, we'll invest on that promise", and then it turned out there was no secret plan, it was as stupid as it looked and it went bankrupt.
The "datacenters in space" thing is a similar play: it's so obviously dumb that a bunch of smart people have tricked themselves into thinking "wow, SpaceX must have actually figured a way it can work!"; SpaceX has not and it is in fact exactly as stupid as it looks.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#69[flagged]
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#70> The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth.
> My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
This is so obviously false. For one thing, in what fantasy world would the ongoing operational and maintenance needs be 0?