The real reason is, Elon has SpaceX and xAI. He can create an illusion of synergy and orders of magnitude advancements to boost the market cap and pocket all the money. He realized long time ago you don't need to deliver to play the market cap game, in fact it's better if you are selling a story far in the future rather than a something you can deliver now.
I don't understand the claim. SpaceX is literally delivering? And I don't think there is any delusion about that being optional.
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…
The real reason is, Elon has SpaceX and xAI. He can create an illusion of synergy and orders of magnitude advancements to boost the market cap and pocket all the money. He realized long time ago you don't need to deliver to play the market cap game, in fact it's better if you are selling a story far in the future rather than a something you can deliver now.
both can be true, he can excel at 'narrative' and also deliver me my Tesla and my starlink, it's not either or
I swear Prof G mentioned this exact same thing happening today
Galloway and Swisher have been speculating about this (as well as a Tesla roll up) for a while. It makes tonnes of sense from Musk's perspective- he's got this behemoth monopoly that'll be worth a trillion on the stock market, meanwhile he's got xAI and Twitter which are both sub-scale money losers. It's easiest way to bail out his bad bets (and keep his investors sweet). The only question is whether eventually Tesla joins the party, it makes the most sense for xAI and Tesla to be joined, but I just don't see how that can happen. The benefit of xAI and x.com is that they were private so there weren't meme stock valuations to compete with, the investors would take a resonable payout know, safe in the knowledge SpaceX will IPO to a meme stock valuation. Tesla's valuation has to return to earth before SpaceX can bail it out and by that point it'll be like catching a falling knife.
SpaceX 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.
That is what they want you to think it isn't too big to fail there are plenty of competitors with much stronger engineers and principles than this grifter.
That could be true, but the real question is why haven't they built and shipped a Starship yet?
You can play around with words as much as you can, but Musk even with a very high rate of failure seems to be making a lot of things work.
The Goalpost shift continues, If elon were working for me, I would have fired him for having never delivered on any of his projects. Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [Insert next]
he seems to return to his investors quiet effectively, which is ultimately what a CEO has to do to attract more capital to build stuff.
And I have a Tesla and starlink and I'm quite happy with the level of autonomy the car has, so he has delivered on some level
SpaceX 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.
Why is it too big to fail? SpaceX can be dissected, parts be sold to the government or the competition. It's too big to fail for Musk, because it is one source of his money, in large paid by the US tax payer.
I see no reason why Starship could not be dumped. And Falcon rockets kept being produced as needed, maybe with higher cost.
That is what they want you to think it isn't too big to fail there are plenty of competitors with much stronger engineers and principles than this grifter.
Who? Finding great engineers is comparatively easy versus knowing how to navigate the DoD procurement process and having the balance sheet strength to run huge losses for ages. Blue origin might have the capital and talent, whilst Boeing has the DoD procurement locked down, but neither have both.
I'm not endorsing merely listing, but yes Blue origin.
You are correct about the issues of navigating the DoD but that isn't a reason to accept these assholes the process needs to be open to normal companies and promote standards without any grifter connections.
SpaceX 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 could fail tomorrow and nothing would change with national security.
This. National security is one of the most abused phrases of all time.
Many companies could simply cease to exist tomorrow, including Spacex and Starlink, and the world would go on. Frankly for the better in a lot of cases.
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…
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When a cultist hits you with their side of, ahm, facts, it invariably ends up being some kind of a logical fallacy. Is there a name for this phenomenon?
In this case it is the "how we dare not trusting all the experts at spaceX."
But even the fallacy itself is applied incorrectly, as we hear zero from anyone else other than the cult leader himself.