Or maybe Tesla
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMKyocHwUJI&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260202-musk-wants-to-merge-spacex-with-xai-then-go-public - podcast
time: 5 min 18 sec
UPDATE: the merge has gone through, apparently for “$250 billion” of imaginary value of private company equity
So.
How much of this is folding all the meme stocks into the one thing that actually produces a product that people all over the world demonstrably want to pay for over the competition to keep their stupid plates spinning?
And how much is religious psychosis, advancing along the singulatarian eschatology from AI to dyson sphere to rebuilding the universe in His Image?
I can’t tell.
Space x needs to be confiscated and rolled into nasa and or space force. I’m sick of pretending that these investors are anything other than parasites
SpaceX is actually really fucking successful, why would be destroy it by tainting it with shitty AI? Oh right, because he’s a moron who does way too much ketamine.
SpaceX has the US government by the balls, and several others, due to Starlink.
Musk wants to leverage that by intertwining SpaceX with his other shitty businesses, to protect them as well.@mech @techtakes Having SpaceX take over X is going to backfire explosively real soon now: France isn’t the only government investigating X for election meddling and peddling child pornography, and it could take down SpaceX’s ability to do business in countries that would otherwise be buying launch capacity:
I’m assuming you mean operationally but not financially? They wouldn’t have to raise capital so much if it were financially so…
I’m using the success rate of the Falcon 9 rocket and how many launches they do as my metrics. If they’re not doing well financially then they’re making some questionable financial decisions.
Remember there’s the bit of spacex that runs a successful commercial rocketry program, but also the bit of spacex that keeps blowing up stupid giant rockets.
All of musk’s companies have to support one of his idiotic pet projects… tesla got the cybertruck, x got grok, spacex got starship. None of them can be stopped, because they’re his and he’s personally invested in them. His flunkeys can only make questionable financial decisions around those projects, because he will fire them if they don’t.
Tesla is struggling and is trying to sidestep into humanoid robotics (a different kind of stupid idea), x was always a money sink, and now elon is concerned that his ai waifu might die without an injection of sweet government cash. It isn’t clear he’s capable of giving a shit about the consequences of any of this.
I mean Starship is a VERY questionable financial decision the way they are running it. The falcon program is another matter. It’s actually remarkable how the two of them are almost diametrically opposed in how they are run.
@BioMan Falcon 9 launches are reportedly sold for $60-80M (or $160-200M for Falcon Heavy). But an F9 launch in Starlink configuration is billed internally at just $12M, for the same payload as a Saturn 1B. Which is just insane (S1B cost $55M per flight in 1972, or $425M today).
I mean I dunno if any internal numbers are meaningful at all as anything but accounting fictions. But the cost of the falcon 9 to external customers is on the believable end of things, even if they are potentially subsidized by funding rounds, and impressive. Near as I can tell it comes from accepting trade-offs: they accept low specific impulse and thus declining performance at high velocity for cheap engines, they accept an overpowered oversized upper stage to have only one engine assembly line and to shift some of the burden to the upper stage that optimally would be on the first, they accept that entering at 2 km/s is way easier than entering at 8 km/s and don’t try to recover the second stage, they accept the steep payload penalty of recovering the first stage. Starship on the other hand tries to brute-force through every trade-off - meaning theyre trying to push their engines through all sanity, the second stage is heavy and bulky and comically oversized, and theyre trying to have a big empty fuel tank be a heat shield which not even the shuttle ever tried.
Well I have some news for you
no space bois thx
Spacex, walking the path of something solved literally 4 decades ago: blows up many rockets
Yeah, super successful. As a grift of course, because that’s what it is
he loves to do this… roll the failures into the successes and pretend it was all awesome all the time.
what a fuckwad
If bankers could roll the dodgy home loans into the successful ones and pretend it was awesome all the time before 2008 why can’t Elon?
IPOs are the only time he feels like he has friends.
SpaceX can’t go bankrupt… You won’t let us go bankrupt… It would be a shame if all those satellites lost their ability to be maintained. This is how he becomes too big to fail.
@Seaguy05 @techtakes Bear in mind SpaceX’s near monopoly is transient: Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is now flying and re-using New Glenn and ramping up launch cadence aggressively. Give it 5 years and unless Starship works 100% to plan, SpaceX will be eroding like Tesla today. (And this ignores the multiple Chinese reusable launcher startups with government backing.)
When Woke 2 comes, we’ll nationalize SpaceX.
When Woke 2 comes
ooh, please tell me there’s a release date already
We can turn it into a horror-themed exhibit park. And sell vip tickets for using some of the more particular roams as rage rooms, just smash all that nonsense up
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Kessler syndrome, and historically starlink’s satellites don’t always burn up in the atmosphere as they should
Shit, this fucker is going to block the goddamn sun if someone doesn’t stop him.
don’t worry, some other fucker will sell the sunlight back to you
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For the millionth time, if every satellite in the starlink constellation were to fail today, they would be gone in about five years at the high end. They are low enough in the atmosphere that they have to fire station-keeping rockets to maintain orbit. If they collide, the small pieces deorbit even faster due to drag.
From this article:
At around 400 kilometers and into the 500-km realm — home to ISS and the SpaceX Starlink satellites among others — atmospheric drag plays a major role. Dead satellites and debris usually slow and burn up in the atmosphere in just a few years. This natural cleansing process accelerates when the sun becomes more active and solar coronal mass ejections strike Earth and cause the atmosphere to swell.
“In those altitudes, we can probably do a lot and we will be forgiven,” Linares says.
That was my understanding, most of the fear of Kessler syndrome starts when you’re talking about things higher up in orbit like at 600km or more.
Agreed in general, but debris from collisions can head upwards as well.
For example, Kosmos-1408 orbited at about 475km and left debris from 300-1100km. This is an older debris chart, but it shows that event in red.
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uh huh. spacex fans are fucking wild
I hate Elon as much as anyone and think that SpaceX is bound for failure…but that article isn’t about a star link satellite. It was a cargo trunk from a SpaceX rocket which prob fell off much lower in orbit.
“ah, but you see, THIS piece of space garbage came from a totally unrelated space-garbage-launching mission”
@ebu @TranscendentalEmpire The multi-billion-dollar exploding-rocket company can’'t be expected to keep track of every piece of trash that falls off of their dogshit spacecraft
No, SpaceX is still responsible for dropping trash that could harm people or property. There’s just a difference between dropping something from orbit and from lower in the atmosphere.
The original argument was about worries over Kessler syndrome and then they moved the goal post to space junk not burning up completely, utilizing an article about space junk that wasn’t ever in orbit.
I don’t give a shit about SpaceX, Elon and all his companies are complete trash. That doesn’t detract from the original argument that existing satalites in low earth orbit aren’t something to loose sleep about.
You could make the argument that putting more junk into space has negative and unnecessary outcomes, but that’s a completely different argument that I would agree with.
anyone else who wants to tell me “for the millionth time” about how it’s super safe to fill low-earth orbit with unprecedented amounts of literal garbage in pursuit of creating a shit-tier ISP that’s sucked hard every time I’ve used it is welcome to take it up with the professor of astronomy that wrote that last article
“it’s not Kessler syndrome unless it’s from the Kessler region of space, otherwise it’s just sparkling Rods from God” fuck you
these fucks: “Don’t make me tap the sign!!!”
the sign: “My final braincell fell out of my open mouth while drooling”
An orange kitty can have ketamine or an iphone, but never both.
Wait, does the Starlink internet suck as well? I mean, it has to have high latency, that much I’ve assumed, but other than that?
every time I’ve used it, it had massive issues with the connection hitching and with delivering anywhere near the promised amount of bandwidth
my experience is my own, etc etc, but it reminded me a lot of how every time I’ve been in a self-driving tesla the only person impressed (and not terrified) of the thing was the owner
We use starlink at work for communicating with some remote customer sites, and it’s been entirely adequate. As a super-subjective latency benchmark, i didn’t notice any particular difference in interactive ssh sessions to the starlink sites, and to the 4g lte sites in the same country. It’s been easier to set up and more reliable that some of the 4g links.
I don’t like the fact that we’e paying elon money, but in the absence of a non-evil, non-ecologically disastrous, reasonably priced alternative, I don’t really have anything to offer management as a replacement. Everything else is either much worse, or more expensive and still worse, or vastly more expensive.
If I understand correctly, the only reason they’re in such low orbit, and thus why there needs to be so fucking many of them, is to have much lower latency compared to geostationary satellites. You know, in case you need to play Quake on your satellite connection.
@V0ldek @techtakes If you want high latency, nothing beats telnet from the UK to a server in California via a comsat in GEO back in the early 90s when the trans-Atlantic cable circuit was down. A three-phase TCP exchange has to crawl up to GEO, 35,000km above the equator, and back down *three times*, never mind the surface level routing.
Gave me a strong appreciation for Berkeley vi’s designed-in ability to cope with slow modems.
I’m told it’s good for satellite internet, if you only have satellite internet.
Has anyone done the math on if Elon can keep these plates spinning until he dies of old age or if it will implode sooner than that? I wouldn’t think he can keep this up another decade, but I wouldn’t have predicted Tesla limping along as long as it has even as Elon squeezes more money out of it, so idk. It would be really satisfying to watch Elon’s empire implode, but probably he holds onto millions even if he loses billions because consequences aren’t for the ultra rich in America.
until he dies of old age
Why so pessimistic, maybe we’ll get lucky instead. The Ketamine could get to him.
I would dare to hope, but seeing how long Trump has been able to chug along despite his diet (and presumably drug habit, like that one debate where he was constantly sniffing) I wouldn’t count on it.
The market can remain irrational longer than a chud’s heart can remain functional
I wonder whether his holdings could be nationalized as a matter of national security.
The democrat party is far too feckless to actually pull that off, but that would be a nice ironic twist to his attempts to leverage government contracts and being too big to fail.
Trump did.
Is this the AI that makes child porn on demand? Wouldn’t shifting liability for that in to your space toy company be bad?
It also owns Twitter because Musk spent $33 billion in AI investment cash to buy Twitter from himself to pay off his debt.
Now he is using space investment money to pay off the AI investors.
Awesome, turn it all into one giant morass of shit. Maybe it’ll all go bankrupt faster.
Merge both into the fucking ground.
Someone is seeing the bubble popping…
