5 ms·

Muskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him. e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy wh

by dzonga 5mo ago

Muskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him. e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.

mustaphah 5mo ago
Extreme smartness has its own failure modes
- tombert 5mo ago
  I'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.
  - peterfirefly 5mo ago
    It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that. It's also a lot less dumb if you can make your chips work well at higher temperatures. It's also a lot less dumb if you can space harden your chips better than anybody else can at the moment. This is what the Terafab thing is about (for now). Not about pumping out insane amounts of chips but about doing practical R&D for chips that work better in space: hardening and higher temperatures. Such chips would also be useful for Starlink/Starshield and for Starship itself. Putting something similar to Akamai/Cloudflare up there would work very well with Starlink. If the costs could be made low enough, of course. Will it make any sense whatsoever for AI training? Not unless he manages to scale a whole lot of things drastically, and probably not even then. It might make sense for AI inference in a few years, though. Faster inference responses (via Starlink) might be worth some money.
    - tombert 5mo ago
      > It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that. No, it's still dumb. No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica. If they built in Antarctica, it would still be cheaper than launching into orbit. You'd have lots of free cold air to potentially cool the computers, and you wouldn't need trained astronauts to fix things when things break. I dont' even think that building a datacenter in Antarctica is a good idea, I'm just saying it's less dumb than launching into space. Even if you make CPUs that are able to work at a hotter temperature, you still have to contend with the fact that space is effectively one giant insulator and these CPUs cannot work at infinitely high temperatures no matter what. Even for something like Akamai space data centers are a dumb idea. Keep in mind, this would be space, where people can't easily get to, so you'd need considerably more physical servers to be installed in order to have fault tolerance. Even if the servers weighed nothing, which they wouldn't, you'd need to power them, and in order to power that many servers you'd need solar arrays considerably larger than the ISS. And what exactly would this buy you? Slightly lower latency for Starlink? With a potentially spotty connection, I'm not even convinced on that; I suspect any latency savings you'd have would be eaten by retries when packages drop. Outside of a neatness factor, I just don't see exactly would be won by doing this compared to just setting up gigantic solar array in the middle of large deserts and building here on earth. You know, the planet we live on, where technicians can go and repair things in datacenters, because servers break all the fucking time, and these technicians don't have to get into a rocket to do that.
      - baggy_trough 5mo ago
        It gets you out of the reach of the suffocating regulatory states here on Earth.
        tombert 5mo ago
        If it's something that could even realistically be done, which again I don't actually concede based on what I said before, then maybe it would have slightly less regulation. Or, and hear me out, Elon is just a drug addict who makes shit up based on his 12-year-old-boy fantasies because it sounds neat and investors just eat it up.
    - gamblor956 5mo ago
      It's actually more dumb if you can manage all of the things to make this farce successful, because high-temperature chips that don't require cooling would work even better on Earth than in space because the temperature resistance could be combined with ambient cooling, and there are far more valuable (and longer-lasting) things that could be launched with greater launch mass efficiency. Also...hardened electronics have been a thing for decades. It's not big because shielding is cheaper and far more effective. The only practical use is military, and there are already DoD suppliers who are generations ahead of SpaceX on the hardened chip front.
    - johneth 5mo ago
      So it's a lot less dumb if 50 really difficult and borderline physically impossible things happen. On the word of a conman. Right.
  - mustaphah 5mo ago
    > I'm not convinced he's all that smart We probably disagree on the meaning of "smartness"
    - tombert 5mo ago
      I'm not even sure I'm willing to concede he's smart by any definition of the word. I guess he's good at making shit up and making his investors forget his failed promises? I guess that requires some level of intelligence.
  - antonvs 5mo ago
    He's been smart at self-promotion and growing (certain kinds of) businesses. But when it comes to non-executive work he did himself, he did a completely mediocre internet directory, and that's about it. No-one would have heard of him if he didn't go into the business side. Things like space datacenters are probably just part of the promotion side. It pumps up share prices for a gullible public. Where's he's been clever is in creating companies that do enough real things to convince many people that he might be able to pull off the unrealistic things as well.
- SimianSci 5mo ago
  After the many years, there have been insider voices indicating that success was despite Musk in many ways. Musk bought his way into cutting edge tech, it succeeded despite him due to the already amazing people working in the industries. The projects that have his actual involvement are pretty regularly seen as mistakes or flops. I personally hold to the idea that whoever at SpaceX crafted the team used to pre-occupy Musk and keep him entertained while the rest of the company worked, is largely responsible for its success.
  - dlev_pika 5mo ago
    I heard this was a thing at Tesla, figure out how to redirect while the grown ups were actually building stuff
tahoeskibum 5mo ago
Did you read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
exe34 5mo ago
To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.
- bonesss 5mo ago
  As a business transaction: Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history. As means to buy an election an Presidency: highly efficient use of capital with an undeniable short and long-term ROI.
  - BeetleB 5mo ago
    > Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history. That he won't have to pay for. Shareholders will, as part of the SpaceX IPO.
    - aniviacat 5mo ago
      If shareholders have to pay the debt, then the shares will be less valuable, and Musk (whose wealth is measured in shares) will be less wealthy, no?
      - BeetleB 5mo ago
        By a tad. SpaceX's worth is an order of magnitude more than Twitter's debt. I doubt any serious person considering buying shares in SpaceX will spend even a moment worrying about Twitter.
        ben_w 5mo ago
        They probably should. I've seen people concerned a subsidiary's GDPR fine would be calculated on the basis of the parent company's global revenue, and in Musk's case something similar has happened in Brazil where Starlink's assets were frozen and justified in part because of how Musk fails to properly delineate between his businesses.
Freedom2 5mo ago
I wonder if a more "hardcore" team, by his words, would have handled this legal case better?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- nkozyra 5mo ago
  A more "hardcore" team will keep telling him he can win on appeals, and bill accordingly.
- rufo 5mo ago
  My understanding is that the case was flimsy enough that no "hardcore" lawyers wanted to represent him. It's not just a matter of money; their record (and, therefore, future earnings) are on the line.
- mrhottakes 5mo ago
  His case was handled as well as any lawyer could have. He signed the deal and then tried to change his mind. That's not how contracts work, and the legal system and status quo have strong interests in keeping it that way.
outside2344 5mo ago
And the Trump thing, which cratered his car business
- shimman 5mo ago
  Yeah but he was able to personally make the call to kill millions of people around the world, he's just going back to his roots.
  - blurbleblurble 5mo ago
    I don't believe in racial essentialism myself but I know someone who does *ducks to dodge downvotes for not only making a bad dad joke but a political one*
  - the_doctah 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - doron 5mo ago
      The results of DOGE A former USAID global health official has cited internal modeling suggesting around 600,000 excess deaths in 2025 alone, roughly two‑thirds among children, due to the collapse of programs for malnutrition, HIV, TB, obstetric care, and child health. https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund... USAID global health and development funding has been cut by on the order of 80–85%, sharply reducing support for vaccination, TB control, maternal health, and other essential services in many poorer countries. Within CDC, DOGE‑related cuts and mass firings have removed thousands of staff, with specific centers (e.g., National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention) losing over a quarter of their workforce. Short term: more outbreaks like the Bangladesh measles surge, interrupted treatment for chronic and infectious diseases, and increased mortality where programs were heavily donor‑funded. Medium term: degradation of global health infrastructure and human capital (loss of trained staff, data systems, and labs), making it harder to recover even if funding later returns. Long term: slower medical innovation, reduced global surveillance capacity, and entrenched health inequities, as countries and communities with the fewest resources bear the brunt of lost support. https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5452513/trump-usaid-foreign-aid-deaths https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1...

by dzonga 5mo ago

Muskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him. e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.

mustaphah 5mo ago

Extreme smartness has its own failure modes

tombert 5mo ago
I'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.
- peterfirefly 5mo ago
  It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that. It's also a lot less dumb if you can make your chips work well at higher temperatures. It's also a lot less dumb if you can space harden your chips better than anybody else can at the moment. This is what the Terafab thing is about (for now). Not about pumping out insane amounts of chips but about doing practical R&D for chips that work better in space: hardening and higher temperatures. Such chips would also be useful for Starlink/Starshield and for Starship itself. Putting something similar to Akamai/Cloudflare up there would work very well with Starlink. If the costs could be made low enough, of course. Will it make any sense whatsoever for AI training? Not unless he manages to scale a whole lot of things drastically, and probably not even then. It might make sense for AI inference in a few years, though. Faster inference responses (via Starlink) might be worth some money.
  - tombert 5mo ago
    > It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that. No, it's still dumb. No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica. If they built in Antarctica, it would still be cheaper than launching into orbit. You'd have lots of free cold air to potentially cool the computers, and you wouldn't need trained astronauts to fix things when things break. I dont' even think that building a datacenter in Antarctica is a good idea, I'm just saying it's less dumb than launching into space. Even if you make CPUs that are able to work at a hotter temperature, you still have to contend with the fact that space is effectively one giant insulator and these CPUs cannot work at infinitely high temperatures no matter what. Even for something like Akamai space data centers are a dumb idea. Keep in mind, this would be space, where people can't easily get to, so you'd need considerably more physical servers to be installed in order to have fault tolerance. Even if the servers weighed nothing, which they wouldn't, you'd need to power them, and in order to power that many servers you'd need solar arrays considerably larger than the ISS. And what exactly would this buy you? Slightly lower latency for Starlink? With a potentially spotty connection, I'm not even convinced on that; I suspect any latency savings you'd have would be eaten by retries when packages drop. Outside of a neatness factor, I just don't see exactly would be won by doing this compared to just setting up gigantic solar array in the middle of large deserts and building here on earth. You know, the planet we live on, where technicians can go and repair things in datacenters, because servers break all the fucking time, and these technicians don't have to get into a rocket to do that.
    - baggy_trough 5mo ago
      It gets you out of the reach of the suffocating regulatory states here on Earth.
      - tombert 5mo ago
        If it's something that could even realistically be done, which again I don't actually concede based on what I said before, then maybe it would have slightly less regulation. Or, and hear me out, Elon is just a drug addict who makes shit up based on his 12-year-old-boy fantasies because it sounds neat and investors just eat it up.
  - gamblor956 5mo ago
    It's actually more dumb if you can manage all of the things to make this farce successful, because high-temperature chips that don't require cooling would work even better on Earth than in space because the temperature resistance could be combined with ambient cooling, and there are far more valuable (and longer-lasting) things that could be launched with greater launch mass efficiency. Also...hardened electronics have been a thing for decades. It's not big because shielding is cheaper and far more effective. The only practical use is military, and there are already DoD suppliers who are generations ahead of SpaceX on the hardened chip front.
  - johneth 5mo ago
    So it's a lot less dumb if 50 really difficult and borderline physically impossible things happen. On the word of a conman. Right.
- mustaphah 5mo ago
  > I'm not convinced he's all that smart We probably disagree on the meaning of "smartness"
  - tombert 5mo ago
    I'm not even sure I'm willing to concede he's smart by any definition of the word. I guess he's good at making shit up and making his investors forget his failed promises? I guess that requires some level of intelligence.
- antonvs 5mo ago
  He's been smart at self-promotion and growing (certain kinds of) businesses. But when it comes to non-executive work he did himself, he did a completely mediocre internet directory, and that's about it. No-one would have heard of him if he didn't go into the business side. Things like space datacenters are probably just part of the promotion side. It pumps up share prices for a gullible public. Where's he's been clever is in creating companies that do enough real things to convince many people that he might be able to pull off the unrealistic things as well.
SimianSci 5mo ago
After the many years, there have been insider voices indicating that success was despite Musk in many ways. Musk bought his way into cutting edge tech, it succeeded despite him due to the already amazing people working in the industries. The projects that have his actual involvement are pretty regularly seen as mistakes or flops. I personally hold to the idea that whoever at SpaceX crafted the team used to pre-occupy Musk and keep him entertained while the rest of the company worked, is largely responsible for its success.
- dlev_pika 5mo ago
  I heard this was a thing at Tesla, figure out how to redirect while the grown ups were actually building stuff

tahoeskibum 5mo ago

Did you read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."

exe34 5mo ago

To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.

bonesss 5mo ago
As a business transaction: Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history. As means to buy an election an Presidency: highly efficient use of capital with an undeniable short and long-term ROI.
- BeetleB 5mo ago
  > Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history. That he won't have to pay for. Shareholders will, as part of the SpaceX IPO.
  - aniviacat 5mo ago
    If shareholders have to pay the debt, then the shares will be less valuable, and Musk (whose wealth is measured in shares) will be less wealthy, no?
    - BeetleB 5mo ago
      By a tad. SpaceX's worth is an order of magnitude more than Twitter's debt. I doubt any serious person considering buying shares in SpaceX will spend even a moment worrying about Twitter.
      - ben_w 5mo ago
        They probably should. I've seen people concerned a subsidiary's GDPR fine would be calculated on the basis of the parent company's global revenue, and in Musk's case something similar has happened in Brazil where Starlink's assets were frozen and justified in part because of how Musk fails to properly delineate between his businesses.

Freedom2 5mo ago

I wonder if a more "hardcore" team, by his words, would have handled this legal case better?

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
nkozyra 5mo ago
A more "hardcore" team will keep telling him he can win on appeals, and bill accordingly.
rufo 5mo ago
My understanding is that the case was flimsy enough that no "hardcore" lawyers wanted to represent him. It's not just a matter of money; their record (and, therefore, future earnings) are on the line.
mrhottakes 5mo ago
His case was handled as well as any lawyer could have. He signed the deal and then tried to change his mind. That's not how contracts work, and the legal system and status quo have strong interests in keeping it that way.

outside2344 5mo ago

And the Trump thing, which cratered his car business

shimman 5mo ago
Yeah but he was able to personally make the call to kill millions of people around the world, he's just going back to his roots.
- blurbleblurble 5mo ago
  I don't believe in racial essentialism myself but I know someone who does *ducks to dodge downvotes for not only making a bad dad joke but a political one*
- the_doctah 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - doron 5mo ago
    The results of DOGE A former USAID global health official has cited internal modeling suggesting around 600,000 excess deaths in 2025 alone, roughly two‑thirds among children, due to the collapse of programs for malnutrition, HIV, TB, obstetric care, and child health. https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund... USAID global health and development funding has been cut by on the order of 80–85%, sharply reducing support for vaccination, TB control, maternal health, and other essential services in many poorer countries. Within CDC, DOGE‑related cuts and mass firings have removed thousands of staff, with specific centers (e.g., National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention) losing over a quarter of their workforce. Short term: more outbreaks like the Bangladesh measles surge, interrupted treatment for chronic and infectious diseases, and increased mortality where programs were heavily donor‑funded. Medium term: degradation of global health infrastructure and human capital (loss of trained staff, data systems, and labs), making it harder to recover even if funding later returns. Long term: slower medical innovation, reduced global surveillance capacity, and entrenched health inequities, as countries and communities with the fewest resources bear the brunt of lost support. https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5452513/trump-usaid-foreign-aid-deaths https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1...