Summarizer

A 10MW data center would require square kilometers of solar arrays, even in space. It’s just as real as the 25k Model 3.

I'm starting to wonder if a person like Elon with his... morals... is who we want to be creating a vision for the future.

Starting?

This is a question that analysts don't even ask on earnings calls for companies with lowly earthbound datacenters full of the same GPUs. The stock moves based on the same promise that's already unchecked without this new "in space" suffix: We'll build datacenters using money we don't have yet, fill them with GPUs we haven't secured or even sourced, power them with infrastructure that can't be built in the promised time, and profit on their inference time over an ever-increasing (on paper) lifespan.

"In space" is the new blockchain.

> Optimus is already very well tele-operated It can't even serve popcorn in a diner.

Anything is possible here, it's just there's no goddamn reason to do any of this. You're giving up the easiest means of cooling for no benefit and you add other big downsides. It's scifi nonsense for no purpose other than to sound cool.

Hmm, Elon really did run that flywheel pretty well. He built the Roadster to drum up some cash and excitement so he could develop the Model S, then he used that success to do the Model X, and then he expanded capacity to develop the 3 and Y, and he reinvested the profits to develop the Model 2, finally bringing EVs to the masses, displacing ICEs everywhere, and becoming the undisputed leader of both EV and battery manufacturering. Oh wait, that didn’t actually happen, because he got distracted or something? He doesn’t really have battery capacity worth writing home about, the Chinese are surpassing Tesla in EV manufacturing, and Waymo is far ahead in self-driving. The amazing space computation cost reduction process sounds rather more challenging than the Model 2, and I’m not sure why anyone should bet on Elon pulling it off.

> Oh wait, that didn’t actually happen Not sure how you can say that. Nothing lasts forever, especially in the face of Chinese market dumping, but for a while there Tesla really was the undisputed king of EV manufacturing, that flywheel is how he got there, he did release all the patents because he said from day one he didn't anticipate or aim for 100% market share for Tesla and assumed there'd always be lots of EV manufacturers in future. All that sounds like - mission accomplished? As for Waymo being ahead, maybe today. But Waymo's tech stack is largely pre-DL, they rely heavily on unscalable techniques like LIDAR and continuous mapping. Tesla is betting big on the "scale up neural networks" model we know works well and their FSD can drive everywhere. They're perhaps behind Waymo in some ways, but they're also in different markets - Waymo won't sell anyone a self driving car and Tesla will. I wouldn't count them out. Their trajectory is the right one. > I’m not sure why anyone should bet on Elon pulling it off. PayPal, SpaceX existing at all, then doing reusable rockets, Tesla, FSD, large scale battery manufacturing, Starlink, X ("he can't fire 80% of employees it'll crash immediately"), robotics, training a SOTA LLM so fast even Jensen Huang was shocked ... the man consistently pulls off impossible seeming things in the face of huge skepticism. How many examples does it take before people start taking the guy seriously? Infinity examples?

I really find the goalpost moving is shocking.. Paypal is in no way a Musk creation, no one makes that claim and in fact they got rid of him quite quickly. X has plummeted in value, and is worth a fraction of what he paid for it? How is this "pulling it off" by shrinking the user base, revenue, etc? While we don't have publicly audited figures, they announced a net loss for the first three quarters of 2025, while it posted profits prior to his purchase. FSD isn't even real? Why would you cite a feature that doesn't actually exist as an example of "Elon pulling it off"? He promised FSD would be available over a decade ago, and it's still not real. > How many examples does it take before people start taking the guy seriously? I'd personally settle for real examples, and not the false ones cited above.

We must be living in parallel universes. Tesla invested into the first Lotus roadster - and put that cash into the S then the X. Used that cash to build the worlds largest factories and make the 3 & Y which sold at enormous volumes - so large in fact that the S & X are now tiny single percentages of sales which is why Tesla is stopping manufacturing them now. Tesla is one of the very few vehicle manufactures which makes a profit manufacturing vehicles. Tesla throws off cash which allows the flywheel to keep spinning. Tesla is now operating fully autonomous rides. They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time. What the Chinese are doing in battery tech is irrelevant to US vehicles as they will never be allowed to sell in the US which is Teslas largest market. The model 2 has the possibility of being profitable at insanely low purchase price which has the potential to completely disrupt the economics of US sales in such a way that legacy auto could well be bankrupt in 5-10 years. Who will be making Waymo's vehicles then?

The Model 2 vehicle program was killed[1]. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

> the 3 & Y which sold at enormous volumes Tesla isn't even in the top 15 auto manufacturers by volume? The largest manufacturer Toyota produces 9x the cars Tesla does. Tesla is also on a multiyear sales drop with no sign of sales improvement. The top 15 car makers produced 70 million cars, to Tesla's 1.7m. They have no enormous volume, at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_manufacture... If Tesla's stock traded in line with its competitors, its a $30-40B company. The hype around future growth (now completely off the charts) is the only reason the stock price is out of line with reality. There is no reason to expect Tesla's sales figures to improve going forward, in fact, they will continue to decrease. > Tesla throws off cash which allows the flywheel to keep spinning Tesla had a profit of $3.8b in 2025 (this is a 46% drop from 2024 and a second year over year drop). It's revenue was $94b (also less than 2024), which places it 12th among auto manufacturers. It's profit is 6th, which is a decent margin compared to legacy makers, but as mentioned above, the profit is plummeting as Tesla struggles to sell cars. It's revenue among all global companies is not even in the top 100. It does not "throw off cash", the business is in a tailspin. >They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time Musk has been promising full self driving mode is within six months to a year away. He first made those claims in the mid 2010s? Do Tesla's have full self driving mode in 2026? There is a decade long trail of failed claims from Musk and Tesla. In 2019, Musk predicted 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020. How many Tesla robotaxis are on the road in 2026? Fifty? One hundred? It's a rounding error compared to the claim that they'd have a million in 2020... Musk said in 2019 that he believed Tesla vehicles were not traditional depreciating assets and instead could appreciate because they contained future-value technologies, especially Full Self-Driving (FSD): “I think the most profound thing is that if you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset — not a depreciating asset.” In fact, Tesla's are among the worst depreciating vehicles on the market today, their depreciation compares to the low end car market of Nissan, Hyundai and other low quality manfacturers. Elon projected 250-500k Cybertruck sales per year. In reality, they sold 38k in 2024, and just 16k in 2025. >They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time

> Tesla is now operating fully autonomous rides. There's been a lot of reporting saying otherwise. Still requiring follow cars. FSD is still trying to kill the driver at random.

Hey remember that time someone had their Tesla running down the highway and the superior self-driving capability failed to see an 18 wheeler that crossed the road and the person was decapitated and there are videos of that complete with blood spray?

1. Mankind never systematically lived in caves; that's just where remains and rock paintings are more likely to have survived. 2. Farming didn't evolve from a vision of "let's stay in one place, so let's find a way to do it"; it evolved from the gradual application of accumulated practical knowledge under real constraints until eventually it was possible to stay in one place. If Paleoelon had somehow convinced early humanity to abandon hunter-gathering and settle into a sedentary life because he had a vision for new markets around farming it would have led to the earliest famine.

Yes, your description of how farming and sedentary lifestyle progressed is much more accurate than my somewhat clumsy attempt. My intention was to emphasise that such a transformative event in human history did not take place thanks to visionaries going against the grain [0] , but rather through a long and complex process. [0] Well, technically in favour of the grain! Pun not initially intended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...

We also shouldn't overlook the benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of porcine flight happen. IDK, what about the side-benefits of applying the "incredible engineering and technical capacity" to something useful instead? Rather than finding rationalisations for space spambots.

"The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time." Im sorry, but this is literally every single figurehead in society today.

All right, so how is it that all you geniuses out here are totally right about this, but all the dullards at SpaceX and XAI, who have accomplished nothing compared to you lot, are somehow wrong about what they do every day? I know being right without responsibility feels amazing but results are a brutal filter.

I once had a job mopping floors and was quite successful at it, even if I say so myself. Based on my experience, do you think it is reasonable for me to claim that I will eventually develop techniques for cleaning the oceans of all plastic waste? Folks are criticizing the pie in the sky claims, not that they can do anything at all.

This vision doesn't come from those great engineers, but from Elon, the guy who promised Hyperloop, FSD in 2 years 10 years ago, and lots of other BS

There's no reason to think the brilliant minds at SpaceX are supportive of focusing their mission in any manner-what-so-ever on datacenters in space. You can't call on their genius as the supportive argument accordingly.

I disagree, I think the idea of a cabal of reactionary comrades inside SpaceX is activist fantasy. I think SpaceX only does what it does with full committment of its people: mind, body, spirit.

I think there's a scenario where that's true: one where the head of your company is collaborative and deferential to expertise. There's another scenario, though: one where the head of your company is a bull in a China shop, whose successes have come almost exclusively through a Barnum-esque scheme of cascading bravado and marketing genius without much expertise, but a marvelous ability to sell any idea purely via unearned gravitas. The former is less sexy: I've compiled loads of talented people, and we're going to solve very hard problems, even some that seem impossible. The latter is very sexy: I'm a genius and we're going to accomplish the impossible in one year via sheer force of my grand will. And even if it doesn't actually happen, I'll sell you on the next vision.

It seems like you’re ascribing to Elon some kind of magic, where you feel he’s breaking the rules of what should be allowed in order to achieve success. Is it impossible you simply don’t understand how what he does works?

So your hypothesis is Elon's domineering personality creates a culture of terrified silence where everybody wants to revolt but Elon is simply too powerful and they have no choice - and this extends to customers, sales and even technology - reality itself bends to the will of mighty Elon? And that's ... unfair?

When a cultist hits you with their side of, ahm, facts, it invariably ends up being some kind of a logical fallacy. Is there a name for this phenomenon? In this case it is the "how we dare not trusting all the experts at spaceX." But even the fallacy itself is applied incorrectly, as we hear zero from anyone else other than the cult leader himself.

So I am a cultist and Elon is cult leader? I think the problem with that is they actually create value in terms of products that work and sell. A cult leader would be more about rhetoric and less about results, I guess? Why does Elon make you so mad?

This place has derangement syndrome unfortunately. Such pessimists, it’s a bit sad

Haha, hard pass on the job. I prefer my oxygen at 1 atm. I'm not a data center technician myself, but I have deep respect for those folks and the complexity they manage. It's quite surprising the market still buys Musk's claims day after day.

> It's quite surprising the market still buys Musk's claims day after day. More disturbing than surprising.

There are a class of people who may seem smart until they start talking about a subject you know about. Hank Green is a great example of this. For many on HN, Elon buying Twitter was a wake up call because he suddenly started talking about software and servers and data centers and reliability and a ton of people with experience with those things were like "oh... this guy's an idiot". Data centers in space are exactly like this. Your comment (correctly) alludes to this. Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft all have so many servers that parts are failing constantly. They fail so often on large scales that it's expected things like a hard drive will fail while a single job might be running. So all of these companies build systems to detect failures, disable running on that node until it's fixed, alerting someone to what the problem is and then bringing the node back online once the problem it's addressed. Everything will fail. Hard drives, RAM, CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, power supplies, fans, NICs, cables, etc. So all data centers will have a number of technicians who are constantly fixing problems. IIRC Google's ratio tended to be about 10,000 servers per technician. Good technicians could handle higher ratios. When a node goes offline it's not clear why. Techs would take known good parts and basically replacce all of them and then figure out what the problem is later, dispose of any bad parts and put tested good parts into the pool of known good parts for a later incident. Data centers in space lose all of this ability. So if you have a large number of orbital servers, they're going to be failing constantly with no ability to fix them. You can really only deorbit them and replace them and that gets real expensive. Electronics and chips on satellites also aren't consumer grade. They're not even enterprise grade. They're orders of magnitude more reliable than that because they have to deal with error correction terrestial components don't due to cosmic rays and the solar wind. That's why they're a fraction of the power of something you can buy from Amazon but they cost 1000x as much. Because they need to last years and not fail, something no home computer or data center server has to deal with. Put it this way, a hardened satellite or probe CPU is like paying $1 million for a Raspberry Pi. And anybody who has dealt with data centers knows this.

Great comment on hardware and maintenance costs, and in comparison Elon wrote "My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space." It's a pity this reads like the entire acquisition of xAi is based on "Elon's napkin math" (maybe he checked it with Grok)

Most of the investors don’t even have a choice. Nor do all the other shareholders like employees. And the boards of Musk companies are stacked with his yes men.

Or he's having another mental break because he knocked up yet another woman and is going to have yet another kid he can't remember the name of.

First of all Twitter had basically no downtime since he bought it, so all the 'internet experts' posting their thoughts were completely dead wrong. If anything Twitter was far more reliable than Microsoft has been these past few years. You are assuming things need to run the same way in space, for instance you mentioned fans, you won't have any in space. You also won't have any air, dust, static, or any moving parts. You are assuming the costs to launch to orbit are high, when the entire point of Spacex's latest ship is to bring the cost to launch so low that it is cheaper per ton than an airplane flight. Maintenance would be nice but you are saying this like Elon Musk's company doesn't already manage the most powerful datacenters on the planet. You have no clue what you are talking about regarding cosmic rays and solar wind, these will literally be solar powered and behind panels and shielding 100% of the time.

> Twitter had basically no downtime since he bought it I'm sorry, but what? Not only has it had multiple half days of downtime, two full days+, but just two weeks ago had significant downtime. https://www.thebiglead.com/is-x-down-twitter-suffers-major-o...

I went looking through your comments. 75% of them (and probably 90% in the lasst 2 years) were Elon related. Tesla, SpaceX, Grok, Twitter, DOGE, etc. Quite a lot of comments for 101 karma if I'm being real. Why do you feel this kneejerk reaction to defend Elon and his companies? You'll never be him. He doesn't care about you. He'd use you for reactor shielding for an uptick in Tesla share price without a second's hesitation. This is cultish behavior. Do you have any idea who you're defending? I'll give you just one example. A right-wing influencer named Dom Lucre uploaded CSAM to Twitter, a video. But he didn't just upload it. He watermarked it first so had it on his computer and then postporcessed it. It was I believe up for days. This was apparently a video so bad that mere possession should land you in prison. And the fact that the FBI didn't arrest him basically tells you he'd an FBI asset. After taking days to ban him, Elon personally intervened to unban him. Why? Because reasons. And this is the same man who it's becoming clear was deeply linked with Jeffrey Epstein, as was his brother [1]. Bringing this back to the original point: this is why Twitter lost 80% of its value after Elon acquired it. Advertisers fled because it became a shithole for CSAM and Nazis. As for "basically no downtime" that's hilarious. I even found you commenting the classic anecdote "it was fine for me" (paraphrased) on one such incident when Twitter DDOSed itself [2]. Your cultish devotion here is pretty obvious eg [3]. I'm genuinely asking: what do you get out of all this? [1]: https://www.axios.com/local/boulder/2026/02/02/kimbal-musk-j... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36555897 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42836560

Lol, did you spot one of his alts? But yeah, otherwise agree that his conduct, within a corporate context and otherwise, do not merit the kind of public adulation he's getting. I also remember (vividly at that) his comments on distributed systems when he bought twitter back in the day and was starting to take it over. I remember thinking to myself, if he's just spewing so much bullshit on this, and I can understand this because it's closer to my body of knowledge, what other such stuff is he pronouncing authoritatively on other domains I don't know so much about?

Do they need to be maintained? If one compute node breaks, you just turn it off and don't worry about it. You just assume you'll have some amount of unrecoverable errors and build that into the cost/benefit analysis. As long as failures are in line with projections, it's baked in as a cost of doing business. The idea itself may be sound, though that's unrelated to the question of whether Elon Musk can be relied on to be honest with investors about what their real failure projections and cost estimates are and whether it actually makes financial sense to do this now or in the near future.

This guy invented reusable rockets that land themselves. I'm sure xAI is not just one guy. Plenty of talented people work there.

No it's just Musk's Big Idea for spacex to hype it before IPO. It's their version of FSD, robots etc. You've got to hand it to him, he is a bullshitter par excellence.

How people still believe his bullshit is unfathomable.

Yeah, I remember people saying that about making 1m model 3s per year, landing rockets, getting 10k+ satellite privately into orbit, and getting millions of subscribers using internet via those satellites. Maybe just maybe the guy does actually get things done, and if you didn't hate him you'd see that? (yes, there are some things he hasn't gotten done. That doesn't take away from what he has gotten done)

Please understand that his companies succeeding in some things doesn’t make the things that are exaggerated, overpromised, or just plain naked hype with no backing somehow practical. It’s an interesting effect of our age that for some figures to some people if any criticism is considered unwarranted then all criticism must be disregarded. It reminds me of growing up in the evangelical church and all the pastors who’d still keep their followers even after they show up in new cars or fly first class, taking the tithes from old ladies on their pension.

This mofo threw a Nazi salute and danced around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw. Then he illegally downloaded the entire US treasury payment database and ran it through his AI and faced zero consequences. After promising to find a trillion in fraud and abuse, he left after less than half a year and declared there wasn't that much fraud after all. To most normal people this long history of overblown claims and complete failures would disqualify him from serious consideration. To most normal people, a massive illegal siphoning of US government data would be beyond the pale and worthy of jail time. But in today's age, there's enough smoke and mirrors that such a charlatan can just float on a sea of adulations right on past any consequences.

> some things he hasn't gotten done That's really understating things. He has promised so many things at various times that the "hits" are at best 10% of what he says. You can't just cherry pick his successes and say "well maybe this will work too" with a track record like that.

Musk is a slimey salesman. His job as CEO is to hype bullshit.

Smart people call it "story telling" /s. Musk bullshit and constant lie made him the richest person in the world. No reason not to continue.

Exactly; most of the world's problems are political problems. Which Musk has no intention to fix, of course, because he's more about money and (buying) status with it. He had an opportunity but decided to aid the regime in extracting people's data instead (probably selling it to adversaries).

That makes much more sense tbh. I believe Musk predicted in 2021 that we would land humans on the moon by 2024 [0]. That obviously has been deprioritized but how many Starships have delivered 50+ tons of payload to the moon so far? [0] https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/spacex-boss-elo...

> which also includes shipping all of the people and supplies to keep them alive) What do you mean, "people" ? I'm pretty sure Musk is only expecting to send self-assembling Optimus robots [1] to do the whole manufacturing. [1] "pre-order now, expected delivery any time soon" (Oh, those times where you try to be sarcastic and realize: "wait, maybe that's the actual plan".)

It would appeal to naive technofetishists, the same crowd of investors enamored by many of Elon's other impossible schemes. The moon mfg makes significantly more sense than the hilarious plan to establish a permanent Mars base in the next 50 years, but that's not saying much.

> So the proposal includes building a planetary-scale railway network on bumpy lunar terrain. And that’s from a fascist who barely managed to dig ONE small one lane tunnel under Las Vegas and called it a revolution. I’m sorry to be rude but people who are still giving musk any credit are stupid at this point. Oh boy, IA data centers in space. It’s not only ridiculous, but it’s also boring and not even exciting at all.

We’re not going to use 100% of our solar panel manufacturing capacity to power space data centers, specifically because everyone else on the ground is so power-hungry. If we’re being generous, it could maybe top out at 1%, which adds another ~20 years to your timeline for a total of 50. I think it’s safe to say this part is bunk (along with everything else about this plan which is also bunk).

That wasn't the original question. The head of this thread was quoting Musk's claim, which I repeat here: > it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space This is 500-1000 times as much as current global production. Musk is talking about building on the Moon 500-1000 times as much factory capacity as currently exists in aggregate across all of Earth, and launching the products electromagnetically. Given how long PV modules last, that much per year is enough to keep all of Earth's land area paved with contiguous PV. PV doesn't last as long in space, but likewise the Moon would be totally tiled in PV (and much darker as a consequence) at this production rate. In fact, given it does tile the moon, I suspect Musk may have started from "tile moon with PV" and estimated the maximum productive output of that power supply being used to make more PV. I mean, don't get me wrong, in the *long term* I buy that. It's just that by "long term" I mean Musk's likely to have buried (given him, in a cryogenic tube) for decades by the time that happens. Even being optimistic, given the lack of literally any experience building a factory up there and how our lunar mining experience is little more than a dozen people and a handful of rovers picking up interesting looking rocks, versus given how much experience we need down here to get things right, even Musk's organisation skills and ability to enthuse people and raise capital has limits. But these are timescales where those skills don't last (even if he resolves his political toxicity that currently means the next Democrat administration will hate his guts and do what they can to remove most of his power), because he will have died of old age.

I grew up on a rural farm in California with a dial-up connection that significantly hampered my ability to participate in the internet as a teenager. I got Starlink installed at my parents' house about five years ago, and it's resulted in me being able to spend considerably more time at home. Even with their cheapest home plan, we're getting like 100 Mbps down and maybe 20 to 50 up. So it's just not true at all that you would have connections that are a megabit or two per second.

He just says shit that sounds smart and then rides the vibes to financial success, but it's not working anymore. 10 years ago when Tesla actually revolutionized the retail EV industry everyone took his word for it. Then after a few failed prognostications the nerds started to doubt his credibility, a few more years of this and the tech press started to see through it, and now he's reduced to only the MAGA-faithful falling for his Phony Stark act. The ground is coming up fast.

Sure, speed matters. Developing new technology happens to matter more. I'm sure investors are going to do their own analysis on this and reach their own conclusions, you should try betting against it.

I was told ca. 2003 or so that because features on computer chips were getting smaller at some rate, and processor speed was getting faster at some other rate, that given exponential this or that I'd have tiny artificial haemo-goblins[1] bombing around my circulatory system that would make me swim like a fish under the sea for hours on end. But it turned out to be utter bullshit. Just like this. [1] https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/respirocytes

In 2026? Grift.

We will have cyber taxis and FSD 100% next year.

It's not really going to happen so we don't have to worry about that.

The real reason is, Elon has SpaceX and xAI. He can create an illusion of synergy and orders of magnitude advancements to boost the market cap and pocket all the money. He realized long time ago you don't need to deliver to play the market cap game, in fact it's better if you are selling a story far in the future rather than a something you can deliver now.

both can be true, he can excel at 'narrative' and also deliver me my Tesla and my starlink, it's not either or

Ok, he delivered your Tesla and your Starlink, but so far he has hasn't delivered your Robotaxi, your Optimus, your lunar lander, your space datacenter etc. And the list keeps getting longer instead of shorter...

>Robotaxi, your Optimus, your lunar lander, your space datacenter etc. And the list keeps getting longer instead of shorter... Lets go through this one by one [1]Robotaxi. Someone just drove coast to coast USA fully on autopilot. I drive my tesla every day, and i literally NEVER disengage autopilot. It gets me to work and back home without fail, to the grocery store, to literally anywhere i need. Whats not full self driving about that? I got in two crashes before i got my Tesla cause i was a dumb teen, but i'm sure my Tesla is a much better driver than my younger sister. Politically it's not FSD, but in reality, it has been for a while. [2] Optimus has gone through three revisions and has hand technology that is 5+ years ahead of the competition. Even if they launched it as a consumer product now, i'm sure a million people would buy it just as a cool toy/ gadget. AKA a successfull product. [3] Lunar Lander Starship, a fully reusable, 2 stage rocket that has gone through 25 revisions and is 95% flight proven and has even deployed dummy starlinks. 10+ years ahead of everyone except maybe stoke. [4]Space Datacenter Have you ever used starlink? They have all the pieces they need... Elon build a giant datacenter in 6 monmths when it takes 3-4 years usually. He has more compute than anybody and Grok is the most intelligent AI by all the metrics outside googles. Combine that with Starship, which can launch 10X the capacity for 10% of the cost, and what reason do you have to doubt him here? Granted... it always takes him longer than he says, but he always eventually comes through.

You don't have to win them all.

He does (or at least a good proportion) if you want to use as precedent for delivering on these promises, though. Especially for the larger more extreme statements and not just buying himself into an existing business.

Why does he? that's an arbitrary standard set by you. His investors are quite happy with his success rate. He is constantly building new stuff. And as a consumer who has had great experience with every product I've bought, so am I

No one buys into Elon's firms because he's expecting dividends. His investors are not investing because of his success rate in delivering on his promises. His investors are investing exclusively because they believe that stock they buy now will be worth more tomorrow. They all know that's most likely not because Elon delivers anything concrete (because he only does that in what, 20% of cases?), but because Elon rides the hype train harder tomorrow. But they don't care if it's hype or substance, as long as numbers go up. Elon's investors are happy with his success rate only in terms of continuously generating hype. Which, I have to admit, he's been able to keep up longer now than I ever thought possible.

Perhaps my marketing background is clouding my view, but have exceptional hyping skills seems quite useful when attracting investment. And fact is Musk is building a lot of stuff of real substance. The hype to substance ratio isn't quite as important as some choose to beleive

Theranos were also hyping a lot and trying to build some stuff. There is some threshold (to be decided where) after which something is more of a fraud than a hype. Also these days stock market doesn't have much relation to real state of economy - it's in many ways a casino.

Not sure who determines the threshold, he certainly goes to court more than your average person, but these are not start ups, they are large companies under a lot of scrutiny. I don't think the comparison is valid

> The hype to substance ratio isn't quite as important as some choose to beleive Musk's ratio is such that his utterances are completely free from actionable information. If he says something, it may or may not happen and even if it does happen the time frame (and cost) is unlikely to be correct. I don't get why anyone would invest their money on this basis.

it's more to do with his track record at creating returns for investors?

> but have exceptional hyping skills seems quite useful when attracting investment. Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) and a lot of ex-crypto-bros (fraudsters) would agree. "Exceptional hyping skills" is (today) possibly a more derogatory term than you're expecting. > And fact is Musk is building a lot of stuff of real substance. I think the point others are making is this is a more accurate description of Musk ~10 years ago. In the past 5 years its been what, the cybertruck?

It's a derogatory comment among certain types of technical employee, I would agree. Not so much amongst those in leadership or softer roles. I wouldn't put cybertruck in the win column personally

I think this is why he gets away with it. A "win" is a product delivered years late for 3x the promised MSRP with 1/10th the expected sales. With wins like these, what would count as a loss?

He gets away with it for one reason only, and because he consistently delivers good returns on capital. Most of Tesla's revenue derives from Model Y and FSD subs. I agree that Cybertruck was a marketing ploy. Don't think it was ever intended to be materially revenue generating.

I don't understand the claim. SpaceX is literally delivering? And I don't think there is any delusion about that being optional.

The wild claim is that they will deliver data centres in space

What'd be the point of inflating market caps like this when it's obvious they'll crash the moment the owner tries to liquidate any of it before the promises are kept?

The same things you are saying about data centers in space was said by similar people 10-15 years ago when Elon musk said SpaceX would have a man on Mars in 10-15 years. We have had the tech to do it since the 90's, we just needed to invest into it. Same thing with Elon Musks hyperloop, aka the atmospheric train (or vactrain) which has been an idea since 1799! And how far has Elon Musks boring company come to building even a test loop? Yeah, in theory you could build a data center in space. But unless you have a background in the limitations of space engineering/design brings, you don't truly understand what you are saying. A single AI data center server rack takes up the same energy load of 0.3 to 1 international space station. So by saying Elon musk can reasonable achieve this, is wild to anyone who has done any engineering work with space based tech. Every solar panel generates heat, the racks generate heat, the data communication system generates, heat... Every kW of power generated and every kW of power consumes needs a radiator. And it's not like water cooling, you are trying to radiate heat off into a vacuum. That is a technical challenge and size, the amount of tons to orbit needed to do this... Let alone outside of low earth... Its a moonshot project for sure. And like I said above, Elon musk hasnt really followed through with any of his moonshots.

His time estimates are notoriously, um, aggressive. But I think that's part of how his companies are able to accomplish so much. And they do, even if you're upset they haven't put a human on Mars fast enough or built one of his side quests. "We specialize in making the impossible merely late"

I note that their accomplishments tend to be in the past, prior to his Twitter addiction absorbing his attention. Tesla is a solid decade late on FSD, cutting models, and losing market share rapidly thanks to his influencer stunts. SpaceX has a solid government launch business, which is great, but they’ve been struggling with what’s been the next big thing for a while and none of that talk about Mars has made meaningful progress. Boring Company, Neurolink, etc. show no signs of profit anytime soon no matter how cool they sound. Being ambitious is good to an extent but you need to be able to deliver to keep a company healthy. Right now, if you’re a sharp engineer you are looking at Tesla’s competition if you want to work on a project which doesn’t get cancelled (like it’s cars) and the stock price being hyped to the moon means that options aren’t going to be as competitive.

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - John Maynard Keynes

Ok but what if I shoot a car into space and buy my own social media company. Surely thats a better use of billions!

As if company performance actually affected stock price when it comes to anything Elon Musk touches. For fuck's sake, TSLA has a P/E of a whopping *392*. There is zero justification for how overvalued that stock is. In a sane world, I should be able to short it and 10x my money, but people are buying into Musk's hype on FSD, Robotaxi, and whatever the hell robot they're making. Even if you expected them to be successes, they'd need to 20x the company's entire revenue to justify the current market cap.

If you're hellbent on arguing with a cult, it will be much cheaper to go down to your local Church of Scientology and try to convince them that their e-meter doesn't work.

> A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging It's curious that we live in a world in which I think the majority of people somehow think this ISN'T complicated. Like, have we long since reached the point where technology is suitably advanced to average people that it seems like magic, where people can almost literally propose companies that just "conjure magic" and the average person thinks that's reasonable?

Just like rockets landing themselves

No, rockets landing themselves is just controlling the mechanism you use to have them take off, and builds on trust vectoring technology from 1970s jet fighters based on sound physics. Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics. Ordinarily we use a void on earth as a very effective _insulator_ to keep our hot drinks hot.

This is a classic case of listing all the problems but none of the benefits. If you had horses and someone told you they had a Tesla, you'd be complaining that a Tesla requires you to dig minerals where a horse can just be born!