As Grok flounders, SpaceX bets future on beating Big Tech at AI
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One can only assume that they put as much effort as they did into neutralizing basically any avenue for shareholders to influence the company largely to prevent the actually competent rocketry business from getting peeled off and having the nonsense dumped.
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I can't wait for SpaceX to be listed on the indexes 2 weeks after IPO, letting his cronies unload their stock onto everyones 401k's.
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Warning to potential SpaceX investors: your CEO who demands total control with no accountability does not want to be in the business SpaceX is in and seems to be pretty good at doing.
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I legitimately think there's a lot to be said for the economic dynamism that our system makes possible, but it feels like in the last couple of generations, a subset of the marketplace has figured out that when investors mostly want to stay hands-off in index-like funds, they can pretty easily opt-in to additionally buying into a bubble but it's basically impossible to opt-out of one.
Spare me the "woe, late stage capitalism" bit, because I think this was probably always possible in principle. We just hadn't seen the right kind of personality that was so simultaneously persuasive, brazen, publicly visible, and shameless.
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IMHO, anyone who is willing to throw money at a man whose track record in business has far more failures than successes and is demanding no accountability for what he does as a condition for investment deserves to lose the money they'll lose in the whole fucked up "Data Centers In Space" bullshit.
If you have a 401K, I'd suggest you move your money to a fund that stays the fuck away from Musk and his bullshit.
If you have a 401K, I'd suggest you move your money to a fund that stays the fuck away from Musk and his bullshit.
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Data Centers in Spaaaaace is a highly debatable proposition. Big investment in that project has a high likelihood of zero return. And everyone knows it.
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Wow. That's roughly 35 users of ChatGPT for every user of Grok.
And that means that even if SpaceX is correct about the size of the TAM for AI ($26T), at best, they should expect to see about 1/35th of it ($0.8T). And most of the analysts I've seen think that SpaceX has significantly overestimated the demand for AI.
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OK, assuming that this plan to launch a constellation of orbital data centres actually happens, I'd be curious on maintenance of these centres.
The Amazon model would be to send technicians up to repair and replace as a one-way trip, human life being worth far less to Amazon than the replacement parts they're carrying. Google would probably charge the technician for the ride, the recovery, and make them wear uniforms that had every square centimeter covered in ads and product placement. Microsoft's would simply crash into each other after several stability updates. But X? How would that look for them and SpaceXAI?
The Amazon model would be to send technicians up to repair and replace as a one-way trip, human life being worth far less to Amazon than the replacement parts they're carrying. Google would probably charge the technician for the ride, the recovery, and make them wear uniforms that had every square centimeter covered in ads and product placement. Microsoft's would simply crash into each other after several stability updates. But X? How would that look for them and SpaceXAI?
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Better their future on "beating Big Tech at AI" while selling $15B of compute time to their biggest rival. Brilliant.
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Maintenance is dumping them into the atmosphere and replacing them when they fail.
The load of exotic metals they dissipate into the atmosphere is appalling.
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SpaceXAI will continue to promise repairs "this year" for a decade. Then, it will quietly shuffle money from a defunct solar business to purchase back it's own degraded capacity, transfer ownership to a trust owned by Kimball, park it in graveyard orbit and never mention it again.
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"Build the infra and lease it out" could be the equivalent of "sell shovels to miners" - a way of cashing in on the AI craze with less overall risk, so long as the leases stay current long enough to pay off the up front costs. That last bit seems a bit uncertain, however.
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The US GDP for the first quarter of 2026 is about 31 Trillion dollars. So they expect AI to become 1/4 of the entire economy! I’d bet you a trillion or two Teslas are full self driving before AI is 1/4 of the GDP. There are clear use cases for LLMs, ML, and the fringe AI stuff, but not $26,000,000,000,000 worth.
The data centers in space thing is also a total fantasy. The power, maintenance, shielding, obsolescence, cooling, and communications are all problems not currently easy to solve. I haven’t seen any real advantages to it either.
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Yeah, in looking at the Tesla takedown protests, I think 70% of stock was owned by investment funds. The biggest one in that category was Vanguard which is primarily an index fund company. I am guessing a large portion of the investment funds are just index funds. Elon and the board owned 15% of the stock (rounding up). So only about 15% of the stock was available for trade but it set the price for the index funds.
I feel like the SpaceX stock is trying to take advantage of this type of situation. Buy into the initial stock offering and then the index funds will have to pick up stock which will drive up the price with such a large portion of the market being index funds.
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This is the sort of context that was badly missing from Ars's previous story on the IPO.
At this point, I have faith in Eric Berger's coverage of technical space stories, but his coverage of SpaceX as a business has lost a lot of credibility. It's way too trusting and lacking in that essential context.
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SpaceX is never going to really take off if it can't build a rocket big enough to launch the owner's ego into the sun.
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He's a very good and well connected journalist and a splendid meteorologist. Everything I've gleaned about him suggests he's an all around good guy. That said, check his bio.
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If 'X' is the point of leverage/market penetration, it's hard to take seriously.
How is that 'everything app' plan going anyway?
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I don't disagree that this was technically always possible. But he couldn't do this alone. There are a LOT of people who could say no but are simply choosing to look the other way or are actively enabling this behavior.
I think what many are calling "late stage capitalism" is just the system being taken over by people who simply don't give a fuck anymore. In part because we've stopped punishing them.
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And the longer it takes to build them (not that they've been running into issues with that or anything), the more expensive they become since the builder is paying interest on their loans without any revenue to cover it.
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Which is why they’re colluding with nasdaq to make sure it gets forced into the indexes two weeks after listing. Lots of people with a 401k that don’t let you pick and choose funds that granularly won’t have a choice about being made into bag holders. This could be the biggest theft in history by orders of magnitude.
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Something tells me they got these outrageous numbers and ideas from Grok. Not a good start.
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SubWoofer2
Ars Tribunus Militum
The Wall St cheerleaders believe that you lose if you bet against Musk. That's the current madness of that crowd.
Musk is betting on AI, not on Starlink, Tesla, nor SpaceX.
Perhaps Wall St has a liking for CSAM and the people who got invited to Epstein's shindigs?
Perhaps some of them are those people?
Musk is betting on AI, not on Starlink, Tesla, nor SpaceX.
Given his track record on AI, it's hard to believe you'd want to throw good money at him.
Perhaps Wall St has a liking for CSAM and the people who got invited to Epstein's shindigs?
Perhaps some of them are those people?
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Commander! You have rained on my glorious parade! For this, I am sending everything I've got at you. But I won't let you have the satisfaction of catching my Nazi chatbot and revenge/child-porn generation system. I'm moving the datacentres for it to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism...
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SPACE!
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SPACE!
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In space no one can hear you peeing... in a water bottle
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this is all just stupid financial games
they rolled twitter's bad debt into SpaceX and now they're tacking on the AI bad debt to produce a 3-in-1 company that's pissing away tremendous amounts of money in all sectors
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J.C. Helios
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Goodbye "Magnificent Seven" (or whatever the current hype-term is); hello "Hateful Eight."
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Coreweave and others in that space are already doing this. They are quite a bit behind.
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Let’s see here you hate our AI but have you tried it in space? Try it, you see, you might like it.
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