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> Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX Bill Ackman has proposed taking SpaceX public by merging it with his Pershing Square SPARC Holdings,
by beambot 8mo ago
> Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX
Bill Ackman has proposed taking SpaceX public by merging it with his Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, distributing 0.5 Special Purpose Acquisition Rights (SPARs) to Tesla shareholders for each share held. Each SPAR would be exercisable for two shares of SpaceX, aimed at enabling a 100% common stock capitalization without traditional underwriting fees or dilutive warrants.
With SpaceX IPO set to be one of the biggest of all time, this could have a pretty gnarly financial engineering impact on both companies -- especially if the short interest (direct or through derivatives) remains large.
- jedberg 8mo agoWhy would SpaceX go public? They already have a robust enough private market to give liquidity to all of their employees and shareholders who want it. They can get more private investment. Going public would add a lot of hassle for little to no gain (and probably a negative of having to reveal their finances).
- spikels 8mo agoIt has been widely reported for weeks that SpaceX is planning to go public in a few months. The reason is they have big plans to run a vast network of AI servers in orbit and will need to raise a massive amount of funding. xAI merger fits with that plan. I'd assume SpaceX still plans to go public. Was ignored on HN but here's an article explaining: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/after-years-of-resisting-it-spacex-now-plans-to-go-public-why/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/after-years-of-resisti...
- kortex 8mo agolol WHAT? AI datacenters are bottlenecked by power, bandwidth, cooling, and maintenance. Ok sure maybe the Sun provides ample power, but if you are in LEO, you still have to deal with Earth's shadow, which means batteries, which means weight. Bandwidth you have via starlink, fine. But cooling in space is not trivial. And maintenance is out, unless they are also planning some kooky docking astromech satellite repair robot ecosystem. Maybe the Olney's lesions are starting to take their toll. Weirdest freaking timeline.
- crote 8mo agoThe shadow thing can be solved by using a sun-synchronous orbit. See for example the TRACE solar observation satellite, which used a dawn/dusk orbit to maintain a constant view of the sun. Cooling, on the other hand? No way in hell.
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoThe cooling is the bit where I'm lost on, but it will be interesting to see what they pull off. It feels like everyone forgets Elon hires very smart people to work on these problems, it's not all figured out by Elon Musk solely.
- spikels 8mo agoGoogle, Blue Origin and a bunch of other companies have announced plans for data centers in space. I don't think cooling is the showstopper some assume.
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoGood call out, and really interesting. SpaceX being the cheapest way to get things into space, it seems like SpaceX is about to become extremely lucrative.
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- clausz 8mo agoEvery telco satellite can cool its electronics. However, more than a few kW is difficult. The ISS has around 100kW and is huge and in a shadow half the time.
- SJC_Hacker 8mo ago> Cooling, on the other hand? No way in hell. Space is actually really cold when the sun is blocked So, solar panels on side, GPUs on the other, maybe with a big ass radiator ...
- airza 8mo agoit wasn't ignored on HN, there were many articles correctly noting that building data centers in space is a stupid stupid idea because cooling things there is infeasible
- spikels 8mo agoGoogle, Blue Origin and at least 5 other smaller companies have announced plans to build data centers in space. My understanding is the cooling issue is not the show stopper you assume.
- bhadass 8mo agoyup, bezos said "we will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades". presumably this means they'll need huge ass radiators, so its all about bringing down launch costs since they'll need to increase mass.
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- gulfofamerica 8mo ago[dead]
- woah 8mo agoWas doing some back of the envelope math with chatGPT so take it with a grain of salt, but it sounds like in ideal conditions a radiator of 1m square could dissipate 300w. If this is the case, then it seems like you could approach a viable solution if putting stuff in space was free. What i can't figure out is how the cost of launch makes sense and what the benefit over building it on the ground could be
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- spikels 8mo ago
- kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago> a vast network of AI servers in orbit That story makes no technical sense. There's no benefit to doing this. Nobody should believe it any more than boots on Mars by 2030.
- colinbartlett 8mo agoOr any more than "full self driving" by 2017.
- ru552 8mo agosure it does, Bezo's space company and Google are both planning the same Here's Sundar talking about doing it by 2027: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-project-suncatcher-sundar-pichai-data-centers-space-solar-2027-2025-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-project-suncatcher-su...
- kevin_thibedeau 8mo agoIt's all BS. There is no viable way to put industrial levels of compute into a space based platform that can work within the severe thermal, power, mass/volume, radiation, reliability, and economic demands. It is just stupid smoke blowing to separate idiot investors from their money. J-school grads don't have a clue what they're parroting about.
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- rhetocj23 8mo ago[dead]