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xAI joins SpaceX
- ecommerceguy 9mo agoToo me this smells of projected cash desperation. Do people actually pay for Grok?
- croisillon 9mo agoas you can see from the Epstein files, people with minor interests have a lot of money
- shrubble 9mo agoYou get Grok with paid x.com ; so there is some sort of cash from that, I would guess.
- organsnyder 9mo agoIs Grok driving any x.com subscriptions?
- Traster 8mo agoAlmost certainly less than it cost them to train grok and definitely less than they're paying to service X.com's debt load.
- LeoPanthera 9mo agoThere are regularly comments on HN from people who say they pay for Musk's various products, and I am always downvoted into oblivion for suggesting that that is ethically problematic. There's obviously quite a lot of autocratist illiberals in tech.
- qingcharles 8mo agoI have clients that have X Premium+ accounts for their businesses and I use Grok that way. The biggest factor with Grok is the censorship which runs both ways. OTOH it allows for bad shit (recent X porn images), but it also allows less nannying in regular queries -- for instance I was looking for a source for a magazine from 80s which is 40 years defunct, and all the other LLMs chided me for trying to commit "copyright infringement" whereas Grok gave me a list of useful sites.
- indoordin0saur 8mo agoYeah, I started using Grok whenever I got scolded by the other AIs or I felt like they were giving me bad answers because of some internal censor or other quirks. I've found it to be very useful when answering physics problems though. It also seems to be different from the other models, which tend to cluster together in terms of responses so I go to it if I feel they aren't working out.
- beklein 9mo agohttps://www.spacex.com/updates#xai-joins-spacex https://www.spacex.com/updates#xai-joins-spacex additionally the longer article on SpaceX site
- baggachipz 9mo agoWell surely this acquisition is above board. Nothing funny going on here, just good old business as usual.
- cyberax 9mo agoWell, at least this time both companies are fully private.
- SeanAnderson 9mo agoFor the next four months, at least.
- andsoitis 9mo ago> Well surely this acquisition is above board. What makes you think it isn’t?
- postflopclarity 9mo agolol
- tokyobreakfast 9mo agoIt's just "Elon zomg lulz" trolling for updoots. This place pretends to know better.
- fabian2k 9mo agoThere's an epic conflict of interest here with Musk owning most of both companies. And they're in entirely separate fields, there is no plausible synergy here to be gained.
- spullara 9mo agohe is literally going to launch datacenters into space to train ai so they are a little related edit: these replies aren't going to age well
- hmate9 9mo agoAny details regarding valuations etc?
- tim333 8mo ago>Rocket company boosts valuation to $1tn and pays $250bn to acquire AI start-up ft
- condensedcrab 9mo ago> 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 the light of consciousness to the stars! I think Elon's taken one too many puffs of hopium
- canadiantim 9mo agoPlus I suspect the sun is already sentient no need to reinvent the sun
- viccis 9mo agoYou'd think he'd have a pretty huge tolerance at this point.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- ncruces 9mo ago> I mean, space is called “space” for a reason. [Face with Tears of Joy]
- tapoxi 9mo agoSo he doesn't want to go to mars he wants to make a big space chatbot?
- jsheard 9mo ago> Current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial data centers, which require immense amounts of power and cooling. You know what's even harder to cool? > Orbital Data Centers
- abakus 9mo agoNobody knows cooling satellites better than SpaceX
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- preisschild 9mo agoThis is basic physics lol Perhaps SpaceX incentive is to lie?
- lukan 9mo agoI cannot really tell satire apart from genuine opinions anymore. (But I do hope it was satire, if not, cooling satelites was/is a big issue and they only have very modest heat creation. A data center would be in a quite different ballpark)
- jsheard 9mo agoMaybe so, but the actual SpaceX engineers are powerless to stop Elon running his mouth.
- dwood_dev 9mo agoI really would like to see a cost and cooling breakdown. I just can't see how you can do radiative cooling on the scales required, not to mention hardening. I thought this was a troll by Elon, now I'm leaning towards not. I don't see how whatever you build being dramatically faster and cheaper to do on land, even 100% grid independent with solar and battery. Even if the launch cost was just fuel, everything else that goes into putting data centers in space dwarfs the cost of 4x solar plus battery.
- pixelpoet 9mo ago[flagged]
- vasco 9mo agoDo you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose.
- joshhart 9mo agoI thought this wasn't viable due to cooling requirements - how do you cool massive amounts of compute when the only option is to radiate it into space - nothing to convect it with? Also, the incredible amount of grift here with the left hand paying the right is scarcely believable. Same story as Tesla buying Solarcity. Board of directors should be ashamed IMO.
- iancmceachern 9mo agoYes. It is very cold up there but there is also no matter, or very little matter. So head conduction and convection don't work, it's all radiation. When we are learning to solve heat transfer problems in engineering school we are generally taught to neglect radiation, because it's effect on cooling the system is typically second or third order when compared to the to "big C's"
- tomasphan 9mo agoIt would take roughly 5000 square meter area to cool a typical small data center heat output (1 MW). Not great, not terrible.
- iancmceachern 9mo agoYeah but these hyperscalers are building data centers that are 100 or even 1000 mW
- UltraSane 9mo agoThat is a very tiny amount of compute though.
- kibibu 9mo agoApparently, OpenAI plan to build 250 GW of computing capacity by 2033. To put that in space, based on your numbers, that's 1,250 square kilometers of cooling - an area roughly equivalent in size to Los Angeles
- 9mo ago
- zeptonix 9mo agoSeems like a great way to play games with moving money around. Come up with a "valuation" and then "acquire".
- Zigurd 9mo agoIt worked for his Twitter co-investors. I guess they overlap enough with Xai investors for them to think it's more clever than it is a rip off.
- TheGRS 9mo agoI'm pretty amazed one can play a shell game for so long and so openly with the public.
- davidguetta 8mo agoNotify me when you launch the first private space company who can go on mars, or the first car company in the US in 100 years. Or build a top AI cluster in less than a month.
- fhd2 8mo agoWell, wouldn't you be on board? 1. Does xAI seem more valuable than X? 2. Does SpaceX seem more valuable than xAI+X? Not sure a lot of people would say "no" to either of these questions. The only other question that I think is worth asking for investors, is how much stock in the acquiring company they get for their stocks in the acquired company. If the valuation of the acquired company in the deal is... optimistic enough, that seems like a no brainer.
- bflesch 9mo ago> By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute. It’s always sunny in space! Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the Sun’s full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multi-planetary future. Apparently optimus robots don't work and he needs to start his final grift, space datacenters, while his datacenters on earth are powered by gas turbines. Most likely he's just trying to bury his epstein involvement where was exposed lying by his own daughter.
- vonneumannstan 9mo agoGoing to be marked at some delusional valuation and at IPO retail bag holders are going to get absolutely massacred.
- vessenes 9mo agoLike Musk's other great public company failures?
- vonneumannstan 9mo agoTesla is marked at purely delusional prices as well. Total hopium on Optimus taking off while their core business craters.
- camhart 9mo agoElon put everything he had into spacex and tesla. Against all odds, both worked out. He's now betting tesla on optimus. People are willing to believe him given his extremely successful track record of beating the odds. Is it guaranteed? No. If it was guaranteed it wouldnt be an investment. You take on risk for the chance at a reward. Calling it hopium is ridiculous--if there's anyone on the planet that has a track record of pulling off the near impossible its Elon.
- vessenes 8mo agoI’m moderately long on Optimus. At least for US based robotics. When I look at the list of companies that can deploy moving stuff at scale, and I intersect that with those that have autonomous ai experience, .. there’s only one company in the us and it’s way way ahead of competitors considered as a joint probability. Boston dynamics is “sold out” next year with 25k industrial preorders. Tesla has the experience to launch a hyper scale factory out of the gate.
- JumpinJack_Cash 9mo agoThey are failures as far as products
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- tapoxi 9mo agoWhy?
- iancmceachern 9mo agoThese are no longer tech companies, to they are financial, and power, instruments of the billionaire class
- andsoitis 9mo ago> 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.
- irinianianian 9mo agoHuge drag we allow it to be controlled by a drugged out nut job.
- iancmceachern 9mo agoAll as a side effect...
- bilekas 9mo agoBecause it's another tool to move money on books and make it seem that spaceX and or xAi look good to investors when needed. That would be my guess.
- elteto 9mo agoPre-IPO price padding. xAI is going nowhere but at least for now it has some value. Move it under SpaceX, bump up SpaceX’s valuation and therefore it’s opening IPO price. Then kill xAI and write it off.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- 2001zhaozhao 9mo agoThere is literally an emoji in the middle of the announcement post. Very on brand for Elon.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- s6i 9mo agohttps://x.ai/news/xai-joins-spacex https://x.ai/news/xai-joins-spacex wrong link?
- Saline9515 9mo agoI still don't understand the "data center in space" narrative. How are they going to solve the cooling issue?
- booi 9mo agothat's the best part! They don't!
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- eukara 9mo agoSame way the dude solved Roadster, full self driving etc.
- sebzim4500 9mo agoCooling 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.
- nicoburns 9mo agoSure, 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.
- alangibson 9mo agoThis. There's no scenario where it's cheaper to put them in space.
- ibejoeb 9mo agoI think there's a lot of a room for an energy play that will ultimately obviate the enormously costly terrestrial energy supply chain.
- Rocka24 9mo agohmmmm
- SimianSci 9mo agoMajor grift vibes, inventing half-baked reasoning to justify massive valuations. If money wasnt so deeply entwined with politics at this point, this is the sort of news that would launch fraud investigations.
- finolex1 9mo agoThis is either insanely ambitious genius or pure shithousery. I guess we'll find out which one it is in 10 years
- Kemschumam 9mo ago5 days after Tesla gave xAi 2 billion.
- bigwheels 9mo agoFunnel money from a public company to a private entity and then make it disappear. Poof! Magic.
- gok 9mo ago> 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 percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.
- padjo 9mo agoPfft that would just require setting up an entire lunar mineral extraction and refining system larger than we have on earth, just minor details.
- moeadham 9mo agoIn fairness, solar cells can be about 5x more efficient in space (irradiance, uptime).
- __alexs 9mo agoSolar cells have exactly the same power rating on earth as in space surely? What would change is their capacity factor and so energy generation.
- Buttons840 9mo agoSpaceX 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.
- UltraSane 9mo agoMerging SpaceX with a public company like Tesla would create a lot of issues for the classified projects SpaceX does.
- wongarsu 9mo agoI imagine those are surmountable challenges. Boeing somehow manages. But more likely that merger would consist of SpaceX acquiring Tesla and taking it private
- HWR_14 9mo agoThere is no way Elon could raise the 1.4 trillion to take Tesla private
- bragr 9mo agoNo? Almost every big defense contractor is publicly traded.
- cyberax 9mo agoRaytheon is public.
- tenpies 9mo agoWhat sort of issues are you thinking? Plenty of defense contractors with classified projects are already publicly listed, so this is not uncharted territory. Lockhead Martin for example: https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lockheed-martin-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2025 https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/news-releases/news-rele... Gives this level of detail: > Aeronautics classified program losses $(950) > MFC classified program losses - It seems very safe from a national security perspective.
- kemotep 9mo agoIf Musk and SpaceX are serious about putting 1 million datacenter satellites into space, then they are not serious about Mars. You cannot simultaneously build and launch 10’s of thousands of Starships to deliver 1 million tons of equipment and supplies bound to Mars while also committing to launching 10’s of thousands of Starships to orbit full of satellites. They would need to quadruple their launch rate, and half of those launches would be Starships bound for Mars, the vast majority of which would never return. How many Falcon9’s have ever been built? It is incredible to say you can build that many rockets and use up that much fuel on any reasonable time scale. You might as well say the Tesla Roadster version 3 will be a Single Stage to Orbit rocket car.
- padjo 9mo agoWhy would you put data centres in space?
- bakies 9mo agoSeemingly to prop up the value of your companies
- FireBeyond 9mo agoRight, just to meet the most minimal of the scenarios for datacenters, someone upthread has calculated "launches every 9 hours, 24/7" as a minimum.
- codechicago277 9mo agoMaybe this is beyond parody… https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1005577738332172289 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1005577738332172289
- kemotep 9mo agoSelf-driving single stage to orbit rocket cars. It can drive you to work and then go on a Starlink launch to LEO and be back in time to pick you up. Add your car to the SpaceX fleet and get paid to own a Tesla!
- jopsen 9mo ago> In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. I never questioned it. Space is also extremely cold, and if it's as dense as Musk cooling won't be an issue.
- AceJohnny2 9mo agoI can't tell how many layers of sarcasm are here, but I just want to highlight that aktshually cooling in space is quite difficult because there is no convection, so the only cooling option is radiative. Which gets a bit hard when the satellite gets blasted by the sun. The ISS doesn't have problems staying warm, it has problems cooling off.
- jopsen 9mo ago> the only cooling option is radiative. It does say he's planning an AI sun, I'm guessing that's the temperature you need to run at for radiation to work.
- pantalaimon 9mo agoThere are already large communication satellites that consume several kW of power.
- FireBeyond 9mo agoOh, good. So we only need to multiply that by 200 million times, per space datacenter.
- pantalaimon 9mo agoThe data center would still consist of many individual satellites, much like a earth based data center consists of many individual servers
- Bootvis 9mo ago
- jcfrei 9mo agoKind 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.
- wongarsu 9mo agoThey 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
- alangibson 9mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- rybosworld 9mo ago> 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?
- moomoo11 9mo agoThey'll just be decommissioned and burn up in space. nVidia will make space-grade GPUs on a 2-3 year cycle.
- pantalaimon 9mo agoThey don't need to be space grade, consumer hardware will do just fine. For AI a random bit flip doesn't matter much.
- ohyoutravel 9mo agoRandom bit flips might even improve output.
- adastra22 9mo agoSingle upset events in a modern GPU are not bitflips. They destroy the surrounding circuitry and usually disable the whole unit.
- pantalaimon 9mo agoIf that happens you disable that CUDA core. If you GPU is too damaged, you deorbit the satellite.
- 9mo ago
- SimianSci 9mo agoIt's a CONSTANT stream of new ideas with no payoff at this point. Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [insert next vibe shift] At what point do people start to see the ever-shifting goalposts for what they are?
- grosswait 9mo agoDon’t forget LEO satellite internet! Oh wait….
- iknowstuff 9mo agoHyperloop was never a company project, neuralink was a separate company, tesla is rolling out driverless robotaxis and fsd is amazing, robots inevitably are going to do the majority of work - there’s no real doubt about it is there? Datacenters in orbit seem insane so idk we’ll see
- ben_w 9mo ago> robots inevitably are going to do the majority of work - there’s no real doubt about it is there? There's a lot of doubt that the AI and compute to enable that would happen on commercially relevant timescales. Consider: "do the majority of work" is a strict superset of "get into car and drive it". The power envelope available for an android is much smaller than a car, and the recently observed rate of improvements for compute hardware efficiency says this will take 16-18 years to bridge that gap; that plus algorithmic efficiency improvements still requires a decade between "car that can drive itself" and "android that can drive a car". (For any given standard of driving). And that's a decade gap even if it only had to do drive a car and no other labour. You can't get around this (for an economy-wide significant number of androids) by moving the compute to a box plugged into the mains, for the same reason everyone's current getting upset about the effect of data centres on their electricity bills. And note that I'm talking about a gap between them, not a time from today. Tesla's car-driving AI still has safety drivers/the owner in the driving seat, it is not a level 4 system. For all that there are anecdotes about certain routes and locations where it works well, there's a lot of others where it fails. That said: Remote control units without much AI are still economically useful, e.g. a factory in Texas is staffed entirely by robots operated over a Starlink connection by a much cheaper team in Nairobi.
- htrp 9mo agoReminder that space only allows for radiative cooling (since there is no air to absorb heat) so data centers in space are going to have massive cooling panels.
- jryio 9mo agoAccountants will be studying the deals and cyclical valuations of AI companies in the same way we study bank runs and FDIC insurance today.
- jonnat 9mo agoPretty terrible for SpaceX. Of course they paid a crazy inflated price for xAI in an attempt to cash in on the IPO. This just devalues SpaceX and exposes the investors to all the AI bubble risk.
- tester756 9mo agoWhat about security?
- mmoustafa 9mo ago> "The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space. I mean, space is called 'space' for a reason. [crying laughing emoji]" This is all the reasoning provided. It is quite sad how a company I admired so much has become embroiled in financial doohickery.
- stingraycharles 9mo agoIt’s not SpaceX’s fault. It’s still a company to admire, it’s just that nobody appears to be able to stop Musk. I wonder why SpaceX investors aren’t revolting.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 8mo agoI wonder why the SpaceX top management is going along with this. It's clearly not in their long term interest to do so.
- stingraycharles 8mo agoFrom what I understand, Musk owns 42% of the company and nearly 80% of the voting rights, so I guess that answers the question. I guess this is the price you pay for buying shares with less voting rights.
- el_nahual 8mo ago> I wonder why SpaceX investors aren’t revolting. Because if SpaceX were valued like a normal company, they would lose their money. SpaceX, as technologically awesome as it is, simply cannot be that big of a company because the market for space launches is relatively small. SpaceX is targeting an IPO at a valuation 500x earnings. They need to jump on the "AI" / datacenter bandwagon to even hope to sell that kind of valuation. The whole "datacenters in space" thing is an answer to the question "what could require 1000x the satellite launches that we have now?" It has nothing to do with what makes sense economically for datacenters!
- alangibson 9mo agoEither this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.
- pantalaimon 9mo agoExisting satellites manage to keep their equipment that already can consume several kW cool just fine. You might need space for radiators, but there is plenty space in space.
- alangibson 9mo agoSeveral kW is nothing for a bank of GPUs. Radiators in space are extremely inefficient because there's no conduction. Also you have huge heat inputs from the sun. So you need substantial cooling before you get around to actually cooling the GPUs.
- DoctorOetker 9mo agoyou put the radiators and the rest of the satellite within the shade of the solar panels, you can still make the area arbitrarily large EDIT: people continue downvoting and replying with irrelevant retorts, so I'll add in some calculations Let's assume 1. cheap 18% efficient solar panels (though much better can be achieved with multijunction and quantum-cutting phosphors) 2. simplistic 1360 W/m^2 sunlight orthogonal to the sun 3. an abstract input Area Ain of solar panels (pretend its a square area: Ain = L ^ 2) 4. The amount of heat generated on the solar panels (100%-18%) * Ain * 1360 W / m ^ 2, the electrical energy being 18% * Ain * 1360 W / m ^ 2. The electrical energy will ultimately be converted to computational results and heat by the satellite compute. So the radiative cooling (only option in space) must dissipate 100% of the incoming solar energy: the 1360 W / m^2 * Ain. 5. Lets make a pyramid with the square solar panel as a base, with the apex pointing away from the sun, we make sure the surface has high emissivity (roughly 1) in thermal infrared. Observe that such a pyramid has all sides in the shade of the sun. But it is low earth orbit so lets assume warm earth is occupying one hemisphere and we have to put thermal IR reflectors on the 2 pyramid sides facing earth, so the other 2 pyramid sides face actual cold space. 6. The area for a square based symmetric pyramid: we have 6.a. The area of the base Ain = L * L. 6.b. The area of the 4 sides 2 * L * sqrt( L ^ 2 / 4 + h ^ 2 ) 6.c. The area of just 2 sides having output Area Aout = L * sqrt( L ^ 2 / 4 + h ^ 2 ) 7. The 2 radiative sides not seeing the sun and not seeing the earth together have the area in 6.c and must dissipate L ^ 2 * 1360 W / m ^ 2 . 8. Hello Stefan-Boltzmann Law: for emissivity 1 we have the radiant exitance M = sigma * T ^ 4 (units W / m ^ 2 ) 9. The total power exited through the 2 thermal radiating sides of the pyramid is then Aout * M 10. Select a desired temperature and solve for h / L (to stay dimensionless and get the ratio of the pyramid height to its base side length), lets run the satellite at 300 K = ~26 deg C just as an example. 11. If you solve this for h / L we get: h / L = sqrt( ( 1360 W / m ^ 2 / (sigma * T ^ 4 ) ) ^ 2 - 1/4 ) 12. Numerically for 300K target temperature we get: h/L = sqrt((1360 / (5.67 * 10^-8 * 300 ^ 4)) ^ 2 - 1/4) = 2.91870351609271066729 13. So the pyramid height of "horribly poor cooling capability in space" would be a shocking 3 times the side length of the square solar panel array. As a child I was obsessed with computer technology, and this will resonate with many of you: computer science is the poor man's science, as soon as a computer becomes available in the household, some children autodidactically educate themselves in programming etc. This is HN, a lot of programmers who followed the poor man's science path out of necessity. I had the opportunity to choose something else, I chose physics. No amount of programming and acquiring titles of software "engineer" will be a good substitute for physicists and engineers that actually had courses on the physical sciences, and the mathematics to follow the important historical deductions... It's very hard to explain this to the people who followed the path I had almost taken. And they downvote me because they didn't have the opportunity, courage or stamina to take the path I took, and so they blindly copy paste each others doomscrolled arguments. Look I'm not an elon fanboy... but when I read people arguing that cooling considerations excludes this future, while I know you can set the temperature arbitrarily low but not below background temperature of the universe 4 K, then I simply explain that obviously the area can be made arbitrarily large, so the temperature can be chosen by the system designer. But hey the HN crowd prefers the layers of libraries and abstractions and made themselves an emulation of an emulation of an emulation of a pre-agreed reality as documented in datasheets and manuals, and is ultimately so removed from reality based communities like physics and physics engineering, that the "democracy" programmers opinions dominate... So go ahead and give me some more downvotes ;) If you like mnemonics for important constants: here's one for the Stefan Boltzman constant: 5.67 * 10^-8 W / m^2 / K ^ 4 thats 4 consecutive digits 5,6,7,8 ; comma or point after the first significant digit and the exponent 8 has a minus sign.
- fglapr 9mo agoThe whole universe was supposed to be turned into paperclips, now it is being turned into graphics cards to produce images of barely legal girls on X. And Musk keeps grifting about Kardashev 2 civilizations while his rockets do not even reach the moon. If SpaceX goes public, that will rescue his xAi shares. I wonder how he will rescue his Tesla shares.
- oant 9mo agoWho got the money? Hahah
- oant 9mo agoAhahaha, who got the money?
- driese 9mo agoSo they use a valid and valuable company to hide a giant dumpster fire company. To add to that, their best argument is "AI in space", which has some real "solar roadways" energy to it. I honestly don't know how any SpaceX shareholder could approve this.
- mandeepj 9mo agoThe first M&A announcement I've seen in my entire life that includes a laughing emoji; maybe that's what it is!
- paxys 9mo agoIf you had told me 4 years ago that Twitter would be merged into SpaceX I would have called you crazy. Yet here we are..
- sillysaurusx 9mo agoIs xAI Twitter? I thought they were separate companies, but honestly I don’t know anymore.
- TheGRS 9mo agoYes X was merged into xAI last year I believe.
- sillysaurusx 9mo agoThat’s wild. So it’s true that Twitter is merging with SpaceX?
- TheGRS 9mo agoThat's what the headline is, yep. Wild times indeed.
- mikeyouse 9mo agoYep.. "all stock deal" last Spring. https://www.paddle.com/news/industry/elon-musk-xai-acquires-x-hybrid-platform https://www.paddle.com/news/industry/elon-musk-xai-acquires-...
- stevenjgarner 9mo agoElon Musk’s AI startup, xAI (x.ai = grok), officially acquired X Corp. (the parent company of the social media platform X or x.com, formerly Twitter/x.com) in an all-stock deal. Both now operate under a unified holding entity, frequently referred to in corporate filings as X.AI Holdings Corp. (or simply xAI). Now SpaceX has moved to acquire or merge with xAI. This effectively brings the social media data from x.com, the AI development of x.ai, and the satellite infrastructure of Starlink/SpaceX under one "super-conglomerate" roof.
- modeless 9mo agoPeople pooh-poohing space datacenters will obviously think this is a bad move. But Elon clearly believes space datacenters will work. Given that, and the fact that SpaceX will IPO this year, this acquisition was inevitable. SpaceX and xAI would not be able to freely collaborate on space datacenters after the IPO because it would be self-dealing. SpaceX likes to be vertically integrated, so they wouldn't want to just be a contractor for OpenAI's or Anthropic's infrastructure. Merging before the IPO is the only way that SpaceX could remain vertically integrated as they build space datacenters.
- bhouston 9mo agoMusk always merges his companies when one is suffering: Twitter/X in xAI SolarCity into Tesla xAI into SpaceC I am just waiting now for Tesla to be acquired by SpaceC as it has run into issues.
- SimianSci 9mo agoThe 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]
- tuhgdetzhh 9mo agoYeah, but there are enough people to buy the hype.
- qaq 9mo agohmm Tesla shipped millions of cars SpaceX launches 90% of space payloads, Starlink is working well. Thats hard to categorize as never delivered on any of his projects
- iandanforth 9mo agoThe crucial thing is that Tesla's valuation has the hype projects baked in. The fact that it never delivered self driving or a robotaxi fleet and is now being saved solely by an import ban on Chinese EVs means that any success he had with Tesla is now an illusion.
- qaq 9mo agoYep but again that does not qualify as never delivered on anything.
- tuckwat 9mo agoI don't follow his promises but have seen first hand how far ahead Tesla FSD is compared to competitors in the consumer space. It's not even close. This current announcement seems silly, though.
- nebula8804 9mo agoHave you tested Supercruise? There is another way to view this. FSD plays fast and loose because they are constantly iterating. The culture at Musk co is that if you dont' keep pushing updates you are in trouble so do we really want to trust that each of his numerous updates are truly tested? This guy is a pathological liar after all. How many lawsuits are they dealing with now? Supercruise only runs on pre mapped routes. If my life is on the line, I'd rather take the pre mapped routes and supercruise design is better at preventing people playing games to defeat the system (ex.shoving an orange in the steering wheel) so I know that others using the system on the road are following the system guidelines. Supercruise may not do everything FSD does but it cuts out a large portion of the "fatigue" portion of driving and as a result can be highly trusted value add.
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoDiscussion on previous speculation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814701
- senko 9mo agoAs 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.
- bialczabub 9mo agoThis 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 that goes immediately out the door in debt payments before paying a cent for the entire business to function. However, if SpaceX acquires X, that ~$1.5B in interest is a fraction of the $8B In profits SpaceX is allegedly generating annually. Further, they can restructure the debt if it's SpaceX's debt, and not owned by X. Investors will be more likely to accept SpaceX shares as collateral than X.
- dmix 9mo ago> 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.
- bialczabub 9mo agoHow do you "know" this? They're private and don't need to report anything. You also have to be careful about who said it and what they meant by "profit," because there is gross profit, EBIT, EBITDA, and others.
- dmix 9mo agoThey report these numbers to their investors who leak them to the press.
- paxys 9mo agoJust a neat bit of financial engineering. You can tell because Elon picked SpaceX instead of Tesla – which would have actually made sense at some level (Optimus Robots + AI). But Tesla is public and so he'd need to follow laws and reporting requirements.
- brokensegue 9mo agodoes he need spacex/xai to prop up tesla or the other way around?
- paxys 9mo agoTesla is still very profitable, as is SpaceX I assume. Twitter/X has been a $44 billion dollar failure, and xAI is a vanity project so Musk can go around saying he is a player in the AI space. Investors in both X and xAI need to be bailed out, hence this announcement.
- verzali 9mo agoI think its an effort to position SpaceX as an AI company in order to justify some ridiculous valuation at IPO.
- Ifkaluva 9mo agoI think it's more so that the upcoming new public shareholders of SpaceX bail out his X/xAI misadventure.
- kypro 9mo agoDo you genuinely not think that "Elon" (xAI) is player in the AI space? You don't have to think they have the best models of course, but they are clearly a very significant, and some might argue, leading player in the AI race.
- CryptoBanker 9mo agoxAI’s models are really not pioneering at all. They weren’t the first to do MoE. Not the first to do open weighting, not the first to have memory or multi-modal vision. So no, I wouldn’t say Elon is a major player in the AI space. People use his models because they are cheap and are willing to undress people’s photos.
- kachapopopow 9mo agoisn't this just fraud in broad daylight? I don't get it. Why not at least try to hide it?
- SimianSci 9mo agoIts only fraud if poor people do it. Welcome to American politics.
- kachapopopow 9mo agono I get it, but I mean fraud is usually kept out of the public. this is fraud in broad daylight?
- slg 9mo agoWhy hide it if you know you won't be punished for it?
- monero-xmr 9mo agoPoor people are using their public car company to buy their private space company?
- kevstev 9mo agoBut the "fraud" here is being done mostly to VC investors with deep pockets and lawyers, at least until he tries to take this entity public. And I can't imagine them just taking this lying down, but then again maybe they realize that offloading this steaming pile on public market investors is the best way out. But even then... SpaceX seemed like it was quite viable on its own, the investors there are the real losers here. It is all very puzzling to me.
- ares623 9mo agoIt's only fraud if rich people lose money
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- gigatexal 9mo agoFinancial engineering. Twitter under Elon became a dumpster fire of porn and hate and big banks were holding 13B in bonds that wouldn’t be worth the paper they were printed on for the company alone so he just links it with his only company that actually is doing something worthwhile… Not sure how X which “merged” wit X (formerly Twitter) and SpaceX really matter or synergize but here we are. It’s all about the money being protected. And this Ketamine using wierdo is gonna be the worlds first trillionaire. Yay all of us.
- ricardobeat 9mo agoTerrible news for SpaceX.
- protocolture 9mo ago<elon venture> rescues failing <elon venture> here have some <unattainable goals> the shareholders love that shiz.
- stetrain 8mo agoCan the orbital data centers communicate with my ceramic solar roof tiles?
- protocolture 8mo agoOnly to set them on fire.
- personjerry 9mo agoxAI owns Twitter... So now space company owns Twitter? Wtf
- jprd 9mo agoI have so many conflicting thoughts that I cannot properly articulate yet. I can say though, this is not going to end well for most, it is clumsily premeditated and starting to feel like dude is just trying to be a Neal Stephenson character.
- WarmWash 9mo agoThe next step will be merging SpaceX and Tesla. Tesla has probably the most valuable shareholders on Earth. Over years of empty promises and meme status, the stock has pretty much purged all the level heads. So it's mostly deluded Elon sycophants giving placing their tithe on the alter of his sci-fi fantasy smoke and mirrors game. In reality he will be dumping the debt of twitter and xAI (and maybe spacex?) on Tesla shareholders, and buoying that with the added layer of hyper that spaceX brings.
- ohyoutravel 9mo agoI am concerned, and haven’t seen anyone else point this out yet, that Musk will move Grok’s CSAM generation capabilities to space to be beyond the reach of terrestrial policing. Does this create some sort of legal loophole here so Musk can do this with impunity?
- TheGRS 9mo agoSo my floating data center in international waters idea has potential investors?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- _fzslm 9mo agoAFAIK he can do whatever he wants in space, but CSAM is still illegal to view or even download in most (all?) countries of the world. So unless the degenerates also move out into space (which I'm sure they're eager to do), it wouldn't really ease the legal situation here on Earth.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- wmf 9mo agoRemember that he wants to make X a bank. An orbital tax haven. But seriously, I think legally satellites are under the jurisdiction of the country they were launched from.
- JumpinJack_Cash 9mo agoMusk: "What do we have that OpenAi doesn't have?" Musk aide while high: "sPaCe" Slightly less high Musk aide: "But what is the synergy, where's the moat and how could that be done in practice and most importantly is there any limiting factor on Earth before we have to bring AI into.." Musk : "SPACE!!!!!!" It is incredible to think that the extremes of the stock market are actually pretty similar, pink sheets/cryptos and these mega companies are actually the same. News fueled pumps and dumps to win the cycle of hype of the week
- falloutx 9mo agoThey were all inside his head or bots replying to him on Xitter
- orwin 9mo agoDo this math include the cost and weight of the radiators? Because it obviously can't work without big radiators, and I don't see them mentioned in the math?
- raincole 9mo ago> scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars! I didn't realize SpaceX's media press is even cringer than Elon's average tweet...
- philipwhiuk 9mo agoI mean this is clearly directly written by Elon. I suspect the SpaceX comms people are equally eye-rolling.
- fuzzfactor 9mo agoMicrodosing might not be the word for it.
- torlok 9mo agoThere's an audience for this. People have been taking these vapid statements and his trouble with communicating as evidence of genius for well over a decade now.
- tim333 8mo agoI quite like the upbeatness. Maybe it won't happen but it makes a change from negativity.
- rvz 9mo ago[flagged]
- SimianSci 9mo agoDoesn't the idea of Orbital Datacenters imply that the constraining resource right now is physical space, and not compute, electricity, etc? Did we suddenly solve the electricity problem, or the compute problem? As far as im aware there are still plenty of datacenters being planned and built right now.
- sailfast 9mo agoI will not be left holding this bag. This is such financial engineering nonsense, and if we had any sort of regulatory controls this would never be allowed to happen - especially BECAUSE of national security reasons.
- gostsamo 9mo agoThe way I read it, X AI is not really profitable and Elon's creditors/coinvestors asked for something tangible for their money, a.k.a shares in SpaceX, his only business that still has some solid foundation. The rest is emois.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- moogly 9mo agoWhat does Gwynne Shotwell think of this. She seemed level-headed, but is she also batshit insane now by osmosis?
- maximgeorge 9mo ago[dead]
- 4ndrewl 9mo agoPurely financial shenanigans. Nothing to see here, please move along.
- TheGRS 9mo agoElon investors should try buying a lottery ticket, it also lets you dream of the future while not providing returns.
- bhhaskin 9mo agoLet's call it for what it is, a payday for Elon. Paper billionaires have figured out they cannot cash out with out tanking their paper, so now you have these circular deals to extract as much as possible. If we had a functioning government they would step in and put an immediate stop to this on national security grounds.
- TSiege 9mo agoOne thing to keep in mind. xAI and SpaceX both have contracts with the DoD. So it makes sense he moved it there rather than Tesla. Not sure I buy the needing AI for doing more in space or if this is to save sinking ship, but if one of his two big companies needed to buy it to keep it afloat it makes sense it was SpaceX and not Tesla. I'm wondering if SpaceX's going public will be delayed. If not we'll see the first test of the public's appetite for what the AI companies' balance sheets look like
- gip 9mo agoI've yet to attain full-stack mastery in my job, but Musk has already attained capital stack mastery.
- lvl155 9mo agoBesides the obvious, why do engineers with real skills still work for this guy?
- matthodan 9mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- reilly3000 9mo agoI suppose one of the ADR’s read something like “…who cares about bitflips, man. Isn’t AI all about probability?” Knowing the insane level of hardening that goes into putting microcontrollers into space, how to the expect to use some 3nm process chip to stand a chance?
- lovidico 9mo agoA trend at the moment is to just hope for the best in cubesats and other small satellites in LEO. If you’re below the radiation belt it’s apparently tenable. I worked somewhere designing satellite hardware for LEO and we simply opted to use consumer ARM hardware with a special OS with core level redundancy / consensus to manage bit flips. Obviously some problems will present for AI there… but there are arguably bigger problems with AI data centres like the fact that they offer almost no benefit with respects to the costs of putting and maintaining stuff in space!
- FloorEgg 9mo agoHas SpaceX figured something out related to photonic chips that dramatically reduces waste heat generation of compute?
- stevenjgarner 9mo agoThis makes a lot of sense. The commercial launch business is not large enough to support all possible Falcon launches, so Starlink was created to take advantage of the low launch cost and vertical integration and is now a major profit center for SpaceX. Starship launches are only going to make sense every 779.94 days (the approx 2 year Mars-Earth proximity). The rest of the time, the launches could similarly be used to deploy orbiting data centers for XAi/Grok etc. Brilliant move.
- outside1234 9mo agoI asked Gemini for a two word summary and it wrote "financial engineering"
- hnburnsy 9mo agoGrok: Integrated Ambition
- jedberg 9mo agoWhenever 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 random bit flips matter when training a trillion parameter model?)
- mohsen1 9mo agonot a problem for "AI". it's just a bit more spice (temperature) which Grok possibly need! jk!
- fooker 9mo agoLLMs specifically are fine with random bits flipped for the results to be 'creative'.
- jedberg 9mo agoThat's not exactly how LLM temperature works. :). Also that's on inference, not training. Presumably these would be used for training, the latency would be too high for inference.
- fooker 9mo agoIt doesn't work like that, but it can. Latency would be fine for inference, this is low earth orbit, that is about 25ms optimistically. Well within what we expect from our current crop of non local LLMs.
- allenrb 9mo agoThis makes me genuinely sad. SpaceX was the one thing of his that Elon has largely avoided screwing up. Imho, this is in large part due to Gwynne Shotwell. She seems to have the personality (not to mention, personal wealth) to kick Elon in the head when he tries to mess things up. What’s happening now is nothing more than a transparent effort to couple the AI hype-wagon to SpaceX in order to drive the valuation higher in the minds of investors who still think that LLMs will completely transform society. I’ll be thrilled if the rocket folks can avoid being distracted by this nonsense, but I’m not optimistic. I’ve been following SpaceX since something like the 2nd Falcon 1 launch and this is the worst thing I’ve seen happen. Sad times.
- chasd00 9mo agoI think it’s just financial, I don’t see this as being detrimental or disruptive to SpaceX much at all.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- aunty_helen 9mo agoI hope all the Tesla shareholders understand that they’re about to get hosed. Musks making Tesla seem like a good fit into the portfolio.
- miltonlost 9mo agoMaking a "sentient sun" is the most bald-faced asinine, drug-induced nonsense that should be the complete destruction of all credibility to anyone who said it or typed it or works for anything here.
- alpha_squared 9mo agoThe 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.
- yeukhon 9mo agoThen he will spin off and then remerge again. He has several more small companies before he plays that game. Maybe next quarter!
- pron 9mo agoI know that per HN's guidelines we're supposed to be "kind and curious", and "reply to the argument instead of calling names". But with some texts, engaging with individual arguments loses sight of the more important bigger picture. So while unkind, the most "thoughtful and substantive" thing I think can be said about this text is: The man's a moron.
- tehjoker 9mo agoWhat kind of financial engineering is going on here? Is xAI about to go bankrupt or something?
- wmf 9mo agoProbably. They are building the largest data centers in the world with very little revenue.
- harrybr 9mo agoGenuine question: is it even theoretically possible to find some way to dump the heat that would be generated by a "data center" in space?
- wmf 9mo agoYes, satellites and the ISS successfully radiate heat today.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- dialogbox 9mo agoISS solar panels only make 200kw at max. https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/ https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri... It's not comparable to any data center.
- varjag 9mo agoSpaceX has jumped the shark.
- _DeadFred_ 9mo agoNow he just needs to work in crypto satellites down to users via all the new phones supporting satellite link to SpaceX. I kinda expected that one first. Distributed payment network outside of government control/oversight seems like something he would be in to.
- mkw5053 9mo agoMusk is moving value out of public hands and into his own. He overpaid $44B for Twitter, then rebranded it as an AI asset by folding X into xAI. He pushed Tesla to invest $2B of shareholder money into xAI despite shareholders voting no. Five days later, SpaceX acquired xAI, effectively turning Tesla’s cash into equity in a private company Musk owns far more of. Musk controlled every step, there was no real arm’s-length process, and he almost certainly knew the outcome in advance. Musk and his private investors get control, inflated valuations, and IPO upside. Tesla shareholders supply the cash, take the risk, and lose leverage.
- codechicago277 9mo agoElon Musk is a genius, but he’s a financing genius. Look at the long history he has of false promises supporting financing deals between his companies and you’ll see this for what it is, a cash injection and a lie to justify it. He did the same thing with a fake solar roof demo when Tesla bought the almost bankrupt Solar City. He also shifted resources from Tesla and SpaceX to support X in the early days. Even founding xAI outside of Tesla, when so much of its valuation was built on its AI capabilities, was questionable.
- RIMR 9mo agoThis 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 people like Elon, who want to seize as much power from the government as they can, ensure that the means for seizing that power are untouchable. Anyone who has ever used Grok or X lately knows that both of these products are heavily manipulated to align with the political, social, and economic views of Elon Musk, who is increasingly boosting "white power" language and full-throatedly backing America's most nationalistic and authoritarian president to date. This is just another consolidation of power, and it's deeply worrisome. Any integrity one may have hoped remained at SpaceX just vanished when they aligned their mission with that of these deeply problematic digital services. And this is not even scratching the surface of what looks like a deliberate attempt to create Kessler syndrome by launching millions of cheap short-term satellites into orbit, or the rationality of putting datacenters into orbit in the first place...
- kibibu 9mo agoSeems 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.
- pokstad 9mo agoDidn’t Elon say that orbital solar collection was a stupid idea due to energy loss in transmission? Using AI as an almost proof-of-work shows that it may potentially be more complex problem than previously thought. If we threw Bitcoin miners up to those satellites you could literally beam money down.
- webdevver 9mo agoknowing elon, he will make this actually work, thus fully vindicating both the financial engineering and his arrogance!
- cosmicgadget 9mo agoSo Elon has more shares when SpaceX IPOs?
- Joker_vD 9mo agoMakes about as much sense as Twitch buying Curse about.. a decade ago?
- phkahler 9mo agoSeems like a way to put a lot of junk in space. If thats in earth orbit it will lead to a lot of junk falling from the sky in 10 years. If it all burns up that will be a lot of nasty shit in the atmosphere - millions of tons!
- etchalon 9mo agoWhat this tells me - xAI is essentially a failure, though at what level I'm not sure.
- chopete3 9mo agoThis is definitely better than merging with Tesla. They can sell xAI/Grok to all automobile companies along with Tesla and other businesses(X.com included) just like the SpaceX services. It would good to see how it was valued.
- stephenr 9mo agoI'm not sure if this is meant to be sarcasm but is there really a need in the car market for on-demand CSAM? What actual use does Grok or any LLM have in a car?
- Oarch 9mo agoJust checking (genuine question) there wouldn't be a sneaky way to weaponize a million satellites in orbit around the Earth, would there? I can't imagine it wouldn't have ever been looked into.
- lateforwork 9mo agoRelated: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission [1]. Blue Origin could snatch SpaceX's Starship lander contract. This looks increasingly a good idea. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/20/science/nasa-spacex-moon-landing-contract-sean-duffy https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/20/science/nasa-spacex-moon-land...
- admax88qqq 9mo ago> This looks increasingly a good idea. Why?
- dmbche 9mo agoSpaceX hits delays according to the article
- lateforwork 9mo agoThe reason for the entire moon mission is national prestige. Is financial fraud consistent with our national prestige? There are better companies.
- inglor_cz 9mo agoThe original Moon mission was masterminded by a literal card-carrying ex-member of the Nazi party (Wernher von Braun) and the American public back then didn't seem to mind.
- soperj 9mo agofool me once (Solar city) shame on you, fool me twice...
- tw04 9mo agoFriendly reminder for anyone that forgot - xAI acquired Twitter, so now Space-X is the proud owner of a dying social media platform that they overpaid for. Any claims that this is about putting compute in space is just a non-sense distraction. This was absolutely about bailing Elon out of his impulsive, drug-fueled Twitter purchase. The only question now is: when they try to go public, will they be punished for wasting so much money or not? My guess is: not.
- OtherShrezzing 9mo agoMusk earns a $1tn payout when Tesla hits $8.5tn dollars. I expect the next step in this series of moves is to turn Tesla into a SPAC & have it acquire SpaceX, bringing its valuation nearer that 8.5t.
- MuskIsAntidemo 9mo ago[dead]
- HWR_14 9mo agoIs he also talking about moving X's servers (since xAI owns X) into space?
- NedF 9mo ago[dead]
- josh-sematic 9mo ago> My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. I have never been so tempted to join Kalshi
- rob74 9mo agoSo... Elon wants to literally build Skynet?
- dev1ycan 9mo agoWe just had an X8.1 CME event, I just want to point out that at any moment we could have an x40 (we had a carrington event already in 1859) or higher event and all those sats at low earth orbit would be fried and start hitting each other, if SpaceX keeps launching more it becomes incredible probable that we might hit the Kessler Syndrome, and we would legit lose access to Space for a WHILE, including all of what satellites entail. Are we ready for that as a modern society or are we going to start enacting regulation against it? I'm sorry but people wanting internet everywhere does not justify we going back to the dark ages for a decade or more.
- gettingoverit 9mo agoUS is dialing back even on global warming. There is no chance current government would risk space superiority for some kessler-shmessler that nobody has ever seen.
- eduardogarza 9mo agoFrom 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 the Congress to kill big reform. And then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers."
- woah 9mo agoIt's messed up that Grok underwrote all those subprime mortgages in 2008
- bandrami 9mo agoI 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.
- andsoitis 9mo ago> Musk's margin on Twitter from being called by his investors, Primary and largest investors in X are: Elon Musk, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey. I don't know that you need to worry about their financial well-being or that they are getting a raw deal.
- jwrallie 9mo agoI suspended my disbelief and gave it a chance but I couldn’t hold it anymore after the emoji.
- Trasmatta 9mo ago> 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 the light of consciousness to the stars! One of the dumbest things I've ever read.
- jmyeet 9mo agoWhen 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-fidelity 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-acquired-x-in-deal-that-values-social-media-site-at-33-billion.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/elon-musk-says-xai-has-acqui...
- n_u 9mo agoA 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-horrible-no-good-idea/ 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-crypto-data-centers-are-nimbys-new-target 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.
- taurath 9mo agoWe 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.
- nickff 9mo agoWho is “we”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station
- taurath 9mo agoGood point. Still a long, long way from data centers.
- whamlastxmas 8mo agoWe have 15,000 satellites in orbit that are almost literally the exact same premise currently being proposed - a computer with solar panels attached. We've being doing exactly this for decades.
- smotched 9mo ago> buy a dying social network for 44bil > merge it with a company created out of thin air for 20bil. > have a third company buy it. put it back on the market for 1.5 trillion.
- kebman 9mo ago"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.
- paxys 9mo agoReminder that SpaceX has received an estimated $38 billion in government funding over the years, and all of its returns are going to a small set of private investors. Socialized losses, privatized profits. As is the American way.
- parsimo2010 9mo agoThoughts: 1. What in the circular funding? This feels more like a financing scheme founding it under X/Twitter and then spinning it over to SpaceX. I suspect some debt is disappearing or taxes aren't getting assessed because of this move. 2. The only thing harder than harnessing "a millionth of the sun's power" on Earth would be launching enough material into space to do the same thing. And that's not even a reason for SpaceX to own an AI company, at least not at this point. The current AI isn't going to help with the engineering to do that. Right now hiring 20-somethings fresh out of college is way cheaper and SpaceX has been very successful with that. quick edit: dang, I even got point 1 backwards. xAI owns X/Twitter, and that means that SpaceX now owns X/Twitter as well as an AI company. Super suspicious that SpaceX could actually think that buying the social media part (a significant portion of xAI's value) would be worth it.
- _cs2017_ 9mo agoIs there anything substantially different about Google's announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813267 that makes it any more sane than the Space-X announcement?
- tim333 8mo agoGoogle never came up with a sentient sun. There's also a YC startup "Starcloud trains first AI model in space using Nvidia hardware" https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/companies/news/1084176/starcloud-trains-first-ai-model-in-space-using-nvidia-hardware-1084176.html https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/companies/news/1084176/st... >the satellite successfully ran Google’s open large language model Gemma and trained NanoGPT on Shakespeare’s works, generating responses in the style of the playwright.
- luckydata 9mo agowow this is one of the most incredibly fraudulent things that ever happened in American capitalism and I'm not ignoring Enron or the mortgage meltdown. I'm speechless the US has given up on any semblance of law and order in matter of financial markets and this stuff can happen without people going to jail.
- billti 9mo ago> Starship will deliver millions of tons to orbit and beyond per year Excuse my naive physics, but is there a point at which if you take enough mass off of earth and launch it into space, it would have a measurable effect on earth's orbit? (Or if the mass is still tethered to earth via gravity, is there no net effect?)
- crote 9mo agoEarth weighs about 5972200000000000000000000 kg. They are claiming to plan to launch ~5000000000 kg / year. That's 8x10^-14 %. You'd need some pretty accurate instruments to tell the difference.
- mr_toad 8mo agoThe Sun masses so much more than the Earth that the Earth’s mass is effectively irrelevant to its orbit.
- jlhawn 9mo ago> the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform What a joke.
- dialogbox 9mo agoWhat if enemy or some anti-ai activities or etc attack it? How to protect it? It's just a too easy target. It's just a dumbest idea ever if Elon truly believes it. I'm pretty sure he doesn't.
- micromacrofoot 9mo agoPerfect timing to offload that debt onto the bag— I mean shareholders.
- siliconc0w 9mo agoI don't see the demand for space being there, OSS is driving costs down and there are still plenty of hardware and algorithmic optimizations we haven't deployed yet.
- jorl17 9mo agoDisgusting.
- sagarkamat 9mo agoDoes this mean the foreign software engineers in xAI are now subject to ITAR?
- nebula8804 8mo agoNot in this administration
- dzonga 9mo agoAnyone remember the quote by Russ Hanneman on SV [0] - "No Revenue, means you're potential pure play" We know datacenters in space - sound plausible enough - yet not practical - hence they're potential pure play - also you can have massive solar in space - unlimited space -- etc -- all true -- but how economical / practical is it ? yet we know on earth - to power the whole earth with solar - only a fraction of the land is needed. Hell it's even in the Tesla Master Plan v3 docs [1] - current limitation being storage & distribution so all you - are now witnessing to the greatest scam ever pulled on earth. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo [1]: https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
- Rzor 8mo agoThe entire thing is a play. Musk should be a science fiction writer. He has that uncanny ability to create a statement that compresses 100+ years of industrial evolution into a few sentences. >Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space. I love how he goes from "the raw material is there" to "we will build high-tech supply chain to process them", just like that, magically. https://i.imgur.com/wLJ60Vj.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/wLJ60Vj.jpeg [I think you should be more explicit here in step two] Also, https://xkcd.com/1724/ https://xkcd.com/1724/ Edit: Formatting
- seatac76 9mo agoxAI to cover X investors, SpaceX to cover xAI, us American public investors to cover SpaceX since it cannot go under for strategic reasons. Ultimate grift.
- resters 9mo agoIf investors are falling for it, I guess all we can hope for is that the government doesn't bail it out!
- tim333 8mo agoI think the head of XAi managed to talk the owner of SpaceX into it.
- mattmaroon 9mo ago“SpaceX is doing great but I want some of that AI investment money.”
- idontwantthis 9mo agoCan someone convince me that this is not a) pure horseshit b) a plan for Elon to sneak enough mass into orbit to hold the Earth hostage? If you can bring millions of tons of anything into orbit around Earth you can destroy civilization, or just France.
- aqme28 9mo ago"Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization" So, basically give ourselves Kessler syndrome. Or is Elon trying to monopolize orbit entirely?
- jimjimjim 9mo agoFrom a technical point of view this doesn't make any sense. From a finance and accounting point of view this makes everything more cloudy. Which certain types of people really like.
- sonofhans 9mo agoWhen 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.
- enb 9mo agoWhenever 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.
- nkoren 9mo agoIn other news, Kessler Syndrome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ag6gSzsGbc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ag6gSzsGbc
- nova22033 9mo agoWhat's to stop president AOC from pulling the clearances of everyone working for SpaceX?
- gordonhart 9mo agoSpaceX 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.
- nova22033 9mo agoAnd? Donald Trump's presidency has made it clear that "this is bad for our country" isn't a sufficient argument.
- gordonhart 9mo agoI'm not really interested in getting in a political mudslinging contest; you asked what's to stop a future president from doing so and I gave a practical answer.
- theodric 9mo agoDon'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-model-training-how-to-opt-out https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-wants-your-data-for-ai-m...
- Rover222 9mo agoI'm sure these comments will be rational and non-biased by political emotions /s
- bitlad 9mo agoAt least there will be AI and Agentic stuff in mars.
- rdedev 9mo agoI swear Prof G mentioned this exact same thing happening today
- evtothedev 9mo agoIt was also foreshadowed in the Benedict Evans newsletter.
- Traster 8mo agoGalloway 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.
- XorNot 9mo agoMan the real story in a few decades is going to be whether SpaceX was onto such a kille business that it survived being used asma fiscal dumping ground for the losses being incurred by mismanagement everywhere else.
- gz5 9mo agoIF we develop beyond earth...then AI, robots and connectivity will likely be huge parts of it. + spacex already is the best way for many payloads to get to space. + starlink is already the best low orbit based connectivity solution. + x is already a great way to train virtual world AI. + tesla (and its robots) is a great way to train physical world AI. + space takes big $ and talent - this combo would have both. the IF at the top is just that. but feels like an interesting convo for this crowd.
- arjunchint 9mo agoThey both have X in their names, just imagine the synergies!
- thelastgallon 9mo agoDatacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/ https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri... Discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- yalogin 9mo agoI thought xAi previously merged with twitter, so all of this is now rolled into SpaceX? Atleast the investors in xAi and the original financiers in twitter get a breather. SpaceX is the new bandaid for this hot mess. Let’s see if this ends up rotting SpaceX or if it gets healed.
- yalogin 9mo agoMusk’s schtick lately has always been to find a challenging problem, point everyone to it and say “ I will solve it by September “, have the stock shoot up and make money. His first dis that with self driving, then twitter, then xAi, and now robots and data center in space. These last two will last him a decade as these are both challenging problems to solve over night.
- anjel 9mo agoBanksters struggled to sell off Twitter notes. Did they get out intact finally?
- jppope 9mo agoThis is why I come to this site. Obviously, Twitter's financials are struggling and theres more than a few people rich people who don't want to take the hit... but we can all drop that for a second to discuss the plausibility of data centers in space. Some links and comments I enjoyed: * https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station * "Technically challenging", a nice way to say "impossible" * "I’m not that smart, but if I were, I would be thinking this is an extended way to move the losses from the Twitter purchase on to the public markets." * "ISS radiators run on water and ammonia. Think about how much a kg costs to lift to space and you'll see the economics of space data centers fall apart real fast. Plus, if the radiator springs a leak the satellite is scrap." * "5,000 Starship launches to match the solar/heat budget of the 10GW "Stargate" OpenAI datacenter. The Falcon 9 family has achieved over 600 launches." [nerdsniper] * "No, we just "assume" (i.e. know) that radiation in a vacuum is a really bad way of dissipating heat, to the point that we use vacuum as a very effective insulator on earth." * "World's Best At Surfing A Temporary Hyperinflation Wave is not a life goal to really be proud of tbh"
- keyle 9mo agoTrails of those low orbit satellites wasn't bad enough. Can't wait to see pictures of night sky ruined by... A data-center in the frame.
- dboreham 9mo agoNow those dumb articles about AI data centers in space from a couple months back make so much more sense.
- TheDong 9mo agoI think there is one more possible framing for this. Recently xAI has been in the news for Groq's revenge-porn-like "undress them" feature, which seems pretty legally questionable. Musk has also been in the news for his own Epstein-related activities. If he can move Groq and X into space, well, there's not very many age-of-consent or revenge-porn laws in space as far as I know, so maybe he'll be able to do some sort of legal leverage where the space data-center can produce otherwise legally questionable AI responses with impunity.
- computerthings 9mo ago[dead]
- jjkaczor 9mo agoGrrreat! Grok in Space... now AI-generated non-consensual sexual materials can be made completely outside the jurisdiction of any earthly body! Rah rah. Line goes up!
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Animats 9mo agoThis is terrible for Space-X. They're doing a great job. Musk has left running it to Gwynne Shotwell, who really is a rocket scientist. Now Space-X has a AI business unit they don't need, a new money drain, and more attention from Musk. Should have merged xAI into Twitter. A failure there would not be a major setback.
- camhart 9mo ago[flagged]
- afavour 9mo agoUnfortunately you led with the claim that Musk cares about freedom of speech, a claim so laughable it renders anything else you say unbelievable.
- camhart 9mo agoElon's purchase of Twitter (now X) opened the door for conservative view points to be heard online. Prior to that, all other major platforms were censoring conservative views (with wide spread company leadership claiming due to pressure from Biden administration). I regularly use X. I get blasted with political posts from both sides constantly on it.
- sham1 8mo agoOf course the irony is that on the flipside, now Elon's using X to censor liberal, progressive, and leftist voices. For example the whole "cisgender" debacle. Or how he had an account banned that was tweeting out the whereabouts of his private plane -- a practice which was being conducted based on publicly available data, for the record. And that's alright, that's his prerogative as the owner of Twitter. He can run the platform how he wishes. It's just very odd behaviour for a self-described "free speech absolutist" although that is a claim he did backpedal on, once it turned out to be bollocks. --- And now for a slightly spicier take. Is it actually bad that conservative voices were being censored? We can all see what happens with this kind of stuff running amok. Like, I'm from Northern Europe and between looking at the rising of the alt-right and pseudo-fascists -- if not even actual fascists in some cases -- all around the EU with support from Musk and the US regime members, the POTUS threatening Greenland and thus not only Denmark but also all of the US' allies here in Europe, him also invading a sovereign nation to kidnap its head of state (Maduro deserved to go, but not like this, not with a blatant violation of international law), and the murders, the disappearances, the disregard for peoples' rights (even the "illegals" have the right to due process, after all), the intimidation of the free press and courts, and similar acts happening in the US on a daily basis, we can clearly see that the current conservative ideology is a threat to peoples' liberty and freedom. And all of us have studied history. We know where this goes, as we've seen this before. It's a clear subversion of the democratic order that has held its ground for the last 80 years, however imperfectly. And we can clearly see that even in the tech sector the so-called "politically neutral" technology gets subverted to support these ends. And one can of course deal out a bunch of whataboutism regarding the USSR, East Germany, Venezuela, China, etc. but as we can currently see, it's currently not the commies causing these problems. It's the brownshirts. And if that situation ever changes, the focused ire of the democratic majority can be redirected, but today's not that day.
- tagalog 9mo agoCan we at least agree this is an awesome thing to try? Way more exciting than spending $70 billion on VR like Meta did when we all just wanted to play games.
- over_bridge 9mo agoWait so now SpaceX is the company letting you undress people? Why mix gold and poop? SpaceX plus xAI.
- lobochrome 9mo agoThe Howard Hughes of our time. Soon enough he will start pissing in milk jugs.
- torlok 9mo agoElon didn't want to get outshined after Sam Altman suggested that "maybe we build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system". When will people realize that these "geniuses" are only good at making money, and any benefit to society is coincidental.
- freakynit 9mo agohttps://tinyurl.com/xai-joins-spacex https://tinyurl.com/xai-joins-spacex
- throttlebody 9mo agoWith that number of more satellites in orbit, launching a manned rocket into space is likely to be too risky due the amount of more debris and satellites. And will it be net energy positive solution ?
- mmaunder 9mo agoIn the past 40 years we’ve seen power per unit of compute decrease by over 40 million times. This says we need to put data centers in space because we can’t produce enough power on earth for AI. That won’t be the case as history has shown, but this is a great way to get AI money for your space ships if you’re going to IPO.
- mlindner 8mo agoIt's interesting as the space fans (who often dismiss AI) say this is a project to get SpaceX's space/Starlink profits for AI. But the AI people seem to think this is to get AI money for space projects.
- nilshauk 9mo agoWhat a clever trick to throw more money (governmental subsidies) into a sinking ship (xAI and "AI" in general). Perplexingly this maneuver will probably boost stock prices thus creating more monopoly money to burn resources with.
- bawolff 9mo agoWe have trouble cooling data centers on earth, so instead we are going to put them in space where cooling is a thousand times harder?
- stingraycharles 8mo agoI think the idea is that energy production is a bigger bottleneck and easier in space. Not saying I agree / disagree, but this seems to be the general thesis of people supporting this idea. That, and the lack of regulation.
- asa400 8mo agoWhy not put these AI/PV installations somewhere out in the ocean instead? A tiny fraction of the energy required to ship them there, you can actually physically get there to fix them, can use seawater for cooling, can use existing Starlink for connectivity, etc. Why/how is space more economical than international waters?
- dpacmittal 8mo agoThis is very clearly a move to sell SpaceX IPO at overinflated prices by promising a vision of a future which is perpetually 5 years away. SpaceX is going to be the next meme stock.
- moezd 8mo agoIn other words, he's cooking the books again. People confuse being able to think big with being allowed to think big. With this much money loaned to him, protectionism and too many PR stunts, I don't think he delivered big enough, and he won't be able to at some point. This is madness.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ziofill 8mo ago> with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs How is this possible?
- whatever1 8mo agoSorry but who buys this bullcrap? Sure you can take a tesla and drive it in your bedroom to use its AC, because you make teslas, but you could also use just a window attached AC?
- qwertytyyuu 8mo agoI thought they were part of twitter
- Kapura 8mo agoah, good. another heap of "exaggerations" (lies) to investors so that the creditors don't take elon out back just yet. hooray.
- panick21_ 8mo agoAs a fan of space this makes me sad. AI Datacenters are complete nonsense. And binding all of this stuff SpaceX is idiotic. SpaceX could do so many great things for space and now its all messed up in the AI race.
- seydor 8mo agoYou can only form one bubble. If spacex IPOs and rockets, Tsla will go to $10. We need more 'moonshot promisers' like Elon going public. Come on AGI people, come on immortality people
- kaon_2 8mo agoUrgh... Elon is famous not for things he's done, but for saying things he is going to do. Do people still buy in to this? Elon Musk always promises things far in the future but doesn't make good on them. He hasn't succeeded in self driving cars. He is never going to mars. He is not solving the LA traffic problem with tunnels. His robots are the equivalent of the Metaverse. He's a phenomenal businessman, and understands that a story is part of that.
- KellyCriterion 8mo agoFT says for 250 billion: https://archive.ph/NqhWj https://archive.ph/NqhWj
- jacquesm 8mo agoElon's usual modus operandi: take the thing that is losing money and merge it with the thing that is making money. Prediction: at some point SpaceX will acquire all Tesla stock and take it private.
- indoordin0saur 8mo agoAren't all the AI companies losing money?
- dirkc 8mo agoSpeculation - Starship is a dead end all of this is a play to inflate IPO prices for SpaceX during the AI bubble. Then cash out and start a new private space company?
- Spacemolte 8mo agoWhenever Elon Musk says free speech, I get the chills.
- andruby 8mo agoElon prepping SpaceX for a meme-stock IPO? Is there any other valid reason? Datacenters in space is just stupid, getting rid of heat is much much easier on earth than in space.
- zgoscenka 8mo agoPolitics and finances aside, I wonder how "sending megatons of mass" into space is more ecological than building power plants needed for data centers on earth? Not only all the fuel that you'd need to burn, but also the fact that this material probably can't be recycled since it will burn on reentry.
- jnsaff2 8mo agoFor anyone too busy to go through all comments. The overall sentiment of the discussion is *overwhelmingly skeptical and critical*. While a small minority of users defend Elon Musk’s track record of defying critics (citing reusable rockets and EVs), the vast majority view the "AI datacenters in space" proposal as scientifically unsound and economically nonsensical. Most commenters interpret the merger as a form of "financial engineering" designed to bail out underperforming assets (Twitter/X and xAI) using SpaceX's valuation ahead of a potential IPO. --- ### *Category 1: Technical Feasibility (Thermodynamics & Environment)* The most robust debate focused on the physics of operating high-density compute in space. * *The Cooling Problem: * Numerous engineers pointed out that space is a vacuum and therefore an excellent insulator. While solar panels generate power, getting rid of waste heat from GPUs requires radiative cooling, which is inefficient compared to terrestrial convection (air/water). Users estimated that the radiator surface area required would be massive and structurally prohibitive. * *Radiation & Durability:* Commenters noted that cosmic rays cause bit-flips and degrade electronics. Terrestrial hardware (like standard GPUs) would not survive long without heavy, expensive shielding, or would require "space-grade" hardening that lags generations behind in performance. * *Maintenance:* On Earth, failed components are swapped; in space, a failed GPU or drive effectively bricks the unit or turns it into space junk. * *Latency:* While Low Earth Orbit (LEO) offers better latency than Geostationary orbit, users questioned the utility of high-latency inference compared to fiber-connected terrestrial centers, particularly for complex AI tasks. ### *Category 2: Financial Engineering & Corporate Governance* A significant portion of the thread analyzed the merger as a financial maneuver rather than a technological necessity. * *The "Bailout" Theory:* Users widely believe this deal is designed to offload the heavy debt and losses from the Twitter (X) acquisition and the high burn rate of xAI onto SpaceX, which is viewed as Musk's most solvent and valuable company. * *SolarCity Parallel:* Many compared this to Tesla’s acquisition of SolarCity—a move previously criticized as a bailout of a failing Musk-owned company by a successful one. * *IPO Preparation:* Speculation suggests this is a play to juice the valuation of a SpaceX IPO by attaching "AI hype" to it, allowing early investors in the struggling X/xAI entities to cash out or convert their equity into SpaceX stock. * *Conflict of Interest:* Commenters questioned the governance of private companies where one individual (Musk) controls the board and directs mergers that may benefit him personally at the expense of specific shareholder groups (e.g., SpaceX employees or investors). ### *Category 3: Economic Viability* Users attacked the business logic of launching datacenters into orbit. * *Cost of Launch vs. Land:* Even with the cost reductions promised by Starship, users argued that land and grid connections on Earth are orders of magnitude cheaper than rocketry. * *Solar Efficiency:* While solar is more efficient in space (no night/clouds in specific orbits), users argued it is still cheaper to simply build more solar panels on Earth and use batteries than to launch infrastructure into orbit. * *The "Million Ton" Claim:* Users crunched the numbers on Musk’s claim of launching "a million tons" of satellites, noting it would require an unrealistic flight cadence (e.g., launching massive rockets every few hours continuously). ### *Category 4: Musk's Reputation & Rhetoric* The thread discussed Elon Musk’s history of promises versus delivery. * *Skepticism:* Users cited a long list of missed timelines and unfulfilled promises (Hyperloop, Full Self-Driving by 2017, Robotaxis, Mars landings) as reasons to doubt the "space datacenter" timeline of 2–3 years. * *Mockery of Language:* There was specific ridicule regarding the press release language, particularly the phrase "scaling to make a sentient sun," which many found to be "drug-induced nonsense" or "cultish." * *The Defense:* A minority of commenters argued that betting against Musk has historically been a bad idea, citing the success of Falcon 9 and Starlink as proof that he can solve "impossible" engineering problems. ### *Category 5: Regulatory, Legal, & Ethical Concerns* * *Jurisdiction Shopping:* Some speculated that moving AI to space might be an attempt to bypass terrestrial regulations regarding copyright, safety, or content generation (specifically referencing Grok’s lack of guardrails regarding CSAM/deepfakes). * *National Security:* Concerns were raised that SpaceX is a critical US defense contractor, and merging it with a "chaotic" social media company and an AI firm introduces unnecessary risk and leverage over the US government. * *Orbital Debris (Kessler Syndrome):* Users worried that launching millions of tons of disposable datacenter satellites would clutter low earth orbit, increasing collision risks and potentially locking humanity out of space travel. ### *Category 6: The "Why" (Strategic Speculation)* * *Energy Arbitrage:* A few users attempted to steelman the argument, suggesting that if Earth's energy grid becomes the primary bottleneck for AI, space offers the only unconstrained solar power source, despite the cooling difficulties. * *Vertical Integration:* Some noted this creates a conglomerate similar to Samsung or aggressive Japanese keiretsu, where the goal is total vertical integration of energy, transport, communication, and intelligence.
- gorgoiler 8mo ago> Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the Moon […] to establish a permanent presence and take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space. The trouble with strip mining the moon is that it is a pristine international geological park where one side is permanently visible from Earth*. In terms of park visits it’s been seen by pretty much every human that ever existed. Take that, Yosemite. The far side will be banned from exploitation to maintain its unique park status as being almost completely radio silent. Perhaps the mining will take place behind the ridge line of limbward mountains: technically on the near side but without being visible. Going underground feels like a bit of a stretch. On the far side, how far does one have to be from the anti-Earth point before one can fire up the WiFi without pissing off the space telescopes? Who will even regulate this stuff? Do we extend the Antarctic treaty for whole-lunar purposes? *Worst case, a 5km wide strip mine is 10 pixels on a DSLR photo, but that’s still too much for some.
- Ekaros 8mo agoStrip mining moon is the easy part. Manufacturing anything used for satellites is the very hard part. It is very hard as is seen from number of players here on earth. But just imagine doing everything in hostile environment with significantly smaller benefits of scale. Might be possible theoretically. But certain infeasible in any level of practise.
- perlgeek 8mo ago> Strip mining moon is the easy part. Is it easy though? The moon surface is full of nasty regolith that can jam up machines pretty quickly. Plus the lack of atmosphere means that any small particle you accelerate fast enough goes into a partial orbit around the moon and hits you on its way back.
- Ekaros 8mo agoRelatively to refining that stuff to anything useful on moon or in space. You have same trouble and then lot more.
- bigbuppo 8mo agoNot sure if this is stock manipulation trying to push the bubble a little further in a way that doesn't require showing something of substance immediately, or if Elon's having another manic episode after doing too many or not enough drugs, but who didn't see this coming? I'm sure next week he'll have SpaceX be bought by The Boring Company, sell that to Tesla, then rename all the companies as "X". Also, whatever happened to his plan to turn twitter into a financial services company?
- seydor 8mo agoAfter all is said and done, all will be renamed to Brawndo (it's got Electrolytes)
- perlgeek 8mo agoWhich stock is being manipulated? Both xAI and SpaceX are private, no?
- bigbuppo 8mo agoAnd yet this relevant information for some reason: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPAX.PVT/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPAX.PVT/
- bigbuppo 8mo agoAlso... is he involved with any other publicly traded companies? Any that have some weird deals that will give him a big fat payday if he can massage certain metrics?
- Ms-J 8mo agoTwo extreme grifting companies owned by the same asshole join dark forces with each other. One hand pays the other.
- motbus3 8mo agocall me crazy but if this isn't related to the AI stuff in military stuff nothing is. Anyone who believes spacex not that is naive
- faragon 8mo agoMy question is how they'll update the hardware, if AI processors get outdated every 4-5 years? Or they will keep outdated satellites just for routing and Internet-related services?
- peterisza 8mo agoYes we should put a Skynet into space so we can't even pull the plug when there's a problem. What could go wrong, right? :D
- peterisza 8mo agoPutting the Sky into Skynet
- martinclayton 8mo agoI'm pleased that Blue Origin and others are making progress on reusable flight hardware, because I fear that SpaceX will itself suffer a "RUD" for non-engineering reasons.
- wazoox 8mo agoWhat a torrent of nonsense. * Starship so far can't put as much tonnage in orbit as New Glenn or several other more conventional rockets. Putting "megatons" of hardware in orbit is an entirely unsolved problem. * the ISS currently carries 250kW of solar panel and 70kW of radiators. Cooling vast amounts of hardware in orbit is ever more an unsolved problem than putting it up there. Sheesh. I'm so tired of this bullshit.
- redog 8mo agoFinancial theatre
- xzjis 8mo agoIt's a scam. I don't understand how EVERYONE falls for Elon Musk's obvious scams, when every year his claims are more fantastical and exaggerated than the last. This is obviously about propping up a shaky business (SpaceX) by making people believe that data centers in space are a solution. It's just riding the AI hype wave. It's impossible to cool servers effectively in space, and, even though I'm skeptical, I'm more inclined to believe in a project to put them in the ocean than in space, simply because water conducts heat, unlike a vacuum. Sure, there's a lot of room in space, but: - it will always take more energy to get into orbit than to install servers on Earth - the distance between the data center and us adds latency, which is not desirable for an LLM - the distance between the satellites themselves adds a huge amount of latency, making the data center less efficient In a nutshell, there are physical problems that can never, ever be solved by science or technology, and even science fiction doesn't dare to invent scenarios this implausible. But then, coming from a pedophile who lied about his ties to Epstein, is it really surprising that he's lying and trying to divert attention right now.
- johnjames87 8mo ago[dead]
- willtemperley 8mo agoAll that tech, and they can't create a nice readble vector map of the clear areas.
- sbt 8mo ago"If you mix raisins with turds, they're still turds" - Charlie Munger Another consequence of US NatSec being gradually privatized is that once your income stream derives mostly from government spending, it becomes an imperative to influence politics to secure that stream. Yet some of these companies will remain vulnerable to shifting political winds.
- cesaref 8mo agoJust out of interest, what's the current 'state of the art' for a chip that is hardened to survive launch and any length of time in orbit?
- creshal 8mo agoDepends on a lot of factors. LEO has high drag, but good radiation shielding, so if you've got a low enough orbit you can use most embedded hardware but need to compensate with bigger thrusters and bigger fuel tanks if you want it to survive "any length of time" without burning up from atmospheric drag.
- ycboy78 8mo agoCool!
- seydor 8mo agoI was never comfortable with calling Twitter "X", but now i will gladly call it "spaceX". Maybe it will become a verb again "I spacex'd it"
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- FrustratedMonky 8mo agoAll of these Musk lead 'X' companies, buy each other, invest in each other, then sell each other to each other, and re-buy. Are we sure this isn't some Ponzi skeem? Is Musk just using purchasing of his own companies as way to inflate them?
- gcanyon 8mo ago> orbital data centers I'm not a rocket scientist, but how do they plan to dispose of all the waste heat? The ISS carefully maintains its temperature, and it's not running racks-full of servers. edit to add: this guy, who is a rocket scientist, explains exactly why it's a terrible idea, and yes, heat management is one reason. https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/ https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
- perlgeek 8mo agoThey don't. It's a con / financial engineering, to hide the losses from Twitter.
- Fuzzbit 8mo agoWith my cynical hat on, this move is to protect xAI from any issues with Tesla having peaked, and to maximise the value in SpaceX ahead of its IPO. I'd also question whether a species deserves a future in the cosmos when we can't even care for the people here on earth, especially when the person leading the charge thinks its ok to shut down USAID which according to published figures will result in millions of deaths of the worlds poorest people to hunger, AIDS, Malaria etc. Tech bro psychopaths need to check themselves.
- grey-area 8mo agoThis is financial engineering for an IPO, whatever spurious justifications are provided.
- dcchambers 8mo agoThis is how Musk is going to make good on his promise to pay back the original people that funded his Twitter purchase and offload that debt. Twitter (X) was folded into xAI. Now xAI is folded into SpaceX. SpaceX will IPO (or be merged with Tesla) and those investors will be able to sell their shares - the debt is "gone", his benefactors make money, and retail investors pick up the short end of the stick.
- mizuki_akiyama 8mo agoAnything to distract the people that he was on Epstein’s island
- thatsadude 8mo agoI hope SpaceX succeeds
- titaniumrain 8mo agolol both companies belong to musk, and he uses investors' money on spacex to buy xAI? poor spacex investors...
- eutropia 8mo agoIf spacex can trick people into paying 10x as much for compute as the next datacenter, they'd be much better off simply building those datacenter satellites and driving them out to the desert and parking them there instead of trying to solve all the dumb problems you create for yourself by putting cutting edge electronics with the power density of electric heaters into space!
- stopbulying 8mo agoOrbital debris is a likely outcome of datacenters in space. Orbital debris cannot be recovered without permission. Wireless power beaming burns the atmosphere. If it is n % efficient, then where is the other 100-n % of that energy? What is the minimum latency to each of the LaGrange points? We should send humanoid robots to establish human-sized habitats with airlocks for a number of years before risking humans. -- 2026
- stopbulying 8mo agoMore predictions and concerns for the future: Can Humans that breathe CO2 breathe on Earth? Humans with tardigrade DNA for radiation resistance risk their offspring losing said advantage if they cross with a person who is not so hardened. Without artificial gravity and fortification, humans' musculoskeletal structures will not develop sufficiently in lower gravity to survive on Earth. If a person is born on Mars, what do they need to do to physically return to Earth?
- LightBug1 8mo agoI'm sure the consummate professional(s), Shotwell and her team, are now delighted to be associated with xAI ... that stalwart of the CSAM community.
- ivanblagdan 8mo agoThis wouldn’t have anything to do with investigations ramping up, would it?
- hnhnhnhnhnhnhn 8mo agoSpaceX and Tesla merger after SpaceX goes public?
- afinlayson 8mo agoI’d love to see the new cap table of this company. My guess is this will be terrible for spacex employees and gains xai a lifeline. My guess is this helps Elon get to trillion dollar status before any changes the tax structure… My reasoning is xai has no moat … except in lawsuits, and spacex has one of the biggest moats in history. And they aren’t valued into this equation.
- quantified 8mo agoAnd who will protect these satellites from adversaries?