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TacoCommander | 1 month ago

Parallel steps:

Step 1: SpaceX IPO

Step 2: Trillion dollar payout

Step 3: Nothing matters any more

discuss

order

falcor84|1 month ago

>Nothing matters any more

Something tells me that Musk isn't the sort of person who'd ever be satisfied. It's easier for me to imagine him like Mr. House from Fallout, trying to control everything over centuries.

plorkyeran|1 month ago

This is true of every billionaire who is still actively trying to get more money. If you're not satisfied at that point, there's no number where you will be.

lamontcg|1 month ago

I'd like to get a look at SpaceX financials. I'm pretty sure their margins are thinner than you might expect, Starlink is less profitable than you might expect (but quite necessary to fund the launch cadence of Falcon 9) and that Starship blowing up over and over has been funded entirely by the US taxpayer and that they'd be insolvent without that.

NetMageSCW|1 month ago

You would be entirely wrong.

For example, NASA has evaluated SpaceX financial status as part of awarding COTS and HLS contracts and determined it reasonable. Also, SpaceX isn’t getting a significant fraction of the costs of Starship development from the HLS contract.

Nevermark|1 month ago

SpaceX is rockets, now global satellite internet, ...

To credibly harness off-world resources at any scale, there are going to need to be automated refueling depots and many kinds of robotic automation for resource extraction. With the Asteroid Belt looking amazing for quantity and accessibility of resources.

That would also completely remove the lid on how many $ trillions of market cap SpaceX could accrue.

So I find it ironic that Tesla is moving away from cars as product, and still talking up humanoid robots, which as yet are not a product, and as research don't seem to have an edge on anyone.

ALSO: Data centers on the moon make more sense than data centers in orbit. Obviously where latency isn't king, but compute is. Simple cooling sinks, dense (low local latency) expansion, dense (efficient) maintenance, etc.

godelski|1 month ago

  > Simple cooling sinks, dense
I think you need to go back to physics class. You seem to not even understand the very basics of heat transfer. You need more than "cold". I'll give you a hint, the problem is the same problem as "in space no one can hear you scream."

I'll also mention that the moon isn't very cold, except on the dark side. In the moon's day the temperature is 120C and at night -130C. The same side of the moon always faces us and the moon isn't always full. I'll let you figure out the rest.

falcor84|1 month ago

If cooling is such an important factor compared to everything else, I would assume we should see data centers in Antarctica long before we see them on the Moon.

worik|1 month ago

> With the Asteroid Belt looking amazing for quantity and accessibility of resources.

Watch out universe, here we come!

What could possibly go wrong, mining asteroids? An awful lot, when we start messing with orbital dynamics in the asteroid belt.

But Space X can externalise those risks. It will probably be centuries before disturbed orbits start to threaten Earth... So who cares?

Me.

habinero|1 month ago

Elon's not doing any of that and never will lol. You're vastly underestimating the cost and complexity of doing anything in space.

Sure, an asteroid theoretically has eighty quadrillion dollars of whatever, but you're going to spend ninety bajillion getting anything there and back, plus you'd ...well, crater the market even if you did.

We're not hurting for heat sinks. There's the entire ocean to work with, for one.

woah|1 month ago

> Simple cooling sinks

What? You're in a huge vacuum thermos