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.
Getting better at creating and erecting solar panels & AI datacenters on earth is all well and good, but it doesn't advance SpaceX or humanity very much. At lot of the bottlenecks there are around moving physical mass and paperwork.
Whereas combining SpaceX & xAI together means the margins for AI are used to force the economies of scale which drives the manufacturing efficiencies needed to drive down launch etc.
Which opens up new markets like Mars etc.
It is also pushing their competitive advantage. It leaves a massive moat which makes it very hard for competitors. If xAI ends up with a lower cost of capital (big if - like Amazon this might take 20 years horizon to realize) but it would give them a massive moat to be vertically integrated. OpenAI and others would be priced out.
If xAI wants to double AI capacity then it's a purely an automation of manufacturing problem which plays to Elons strengths (Tesla & automation). For anyone on earth doubling capacity means working with electricity restrictions, licensing, bureaucracy, etc. For example all turbines needed for electricity plants are sold years in advance. You can't get a new thermal plant built & online within 5 years even if you had infinite money as turbines are highly complex and just not available.
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.
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?
What, exactly, is unscalable about LiDAR? BYD appears to be planning to include LiDAR (one unit, presumably forward facing) in even their cheapest cars effective quite soon, and they seem to have a few tens of thousands of LiDAR units already on the road.
And Waymo’s solution is expensive but seems to scale fine.
Meanwhile, there is certainly nothing inherently that prevents scaling a pure-vision approach that relies on massive in-car computation, but Tesla wants to use their AI5 chips and they seem to be struggling to produce and scale them. (They also apparently want to launch them into space, but it’s not really clear that they exist.)
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.
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?
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.
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
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?
This was one of the first things that made me realise how un-serious Musk was about Mars.
Paraphrasing him, "You can be the first pizza restaurant owners on Mars" and "The price of a ticket isn't far off the price of a house, normal people can get a loan for it". What bank in their right mind would lend even just $100k to a normal person for a ticket to a place, let alone one with worse economic prospects than La Güera in Western Sahara?*
Don't get me wrong, if there was any seriousness behind this I was, and might still be, excited by the prospect of a new world… but even if I had not soured on Musk politically, I would not trust his plans when they come with this level of attention to detail (not even in rhetoric).
* I don't trust LLMs where I can't verify them, but I did ask it for a vibe check about the cost of research needed for making a pizza from ISRU on mars, and the first step was water purification for which it estimated a few hundred million, and a combined cost with all the other steps 4-10 billion (before launches)
There is nothing we need on Mars other than science. It's not a market because there isn't money to be made outside of what is required to do whatever economically useless but scientifically valuable efforts we can convince people to fund.
We can't build an independent colony we can't live there any time soon. Arguably it may never make sense to live there.
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.
While what you say is mostly correct, the lifestyle switch to farming was determined not by some random gradual accumulation of knowledge during the previous million years, but by accelerated accumulation of knowledge during a few thousand years at most, which was caused by the dwindling hunting resources, which forced humans to abandon the lifestyle that they had for a couple million years and switch to a lifestyle where the staple food consisted of plant seeds, with anything else providing much less of the nutrient intake. Only after a few more thousand years, raising domestic animals allowed the return to a more diverse diet.
Switching to a farming lifestyle was certainly not done by choice, but to avoid death by starvation, as we now know that this has caused various health problems, especially in the beginning, presumably until experience has taught them to achieve a more balanced diet, by combining at least 3 kinds of plant seeds, 2 with complementary amino acid profile and 1 kind of oily seeds for essential fatty acids (the most ancient farming societies have combined barley or einkorn or emmer wheat with lentils or peas or a few other legumes less used today and with flax seeds).
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.
In this context, 'systematically' is a qualifier to the adverb 'never'. It serves as a disclaimer to avoid someone pointing out that, well actually, some humans have lived in caves and do so to the present day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number has some examples and a bunch of info. Most of them are pretty artificial, but the concatenation of the primes one is... at least interesting, not obvious (to me) from doing that that it'd be normal.
Hmm, you are referring to rich numbers but pointing to normal numbers, so I will be the nerd who points out that every normal number is rich, but some rich numbers aren't normal.
They have no fabs. They're using nvidia chips on server side last I checked, and what tsmc thei own design for in car? Those aren't cheap anyway. The markup on nvidia chips is high, but it's not _that_ high.
Last I recall, you get different answers if you taste just a sip verses a larger amount. Pepsi has a good first taste, but after a couple of sips it's pretty overpoweringly sweet, even compared to other sodas.
go.mod will always match whatever versions are being used directly, as far as I know. But it's not possible to lock them using go.mod. Like if you wanted to bump one version only in go.mod, you're then stumped for actually doing that. Because _probably_ the only reasonable way to get that to build is to do `go mod tidy` after doing that, which will modify go.mod itself. And you can't _really_ go back in and undo it unless you just manually do all of go.mod and go.sum yourself.
Running `go mod tidy` months apart with no other changes to your module will not change your go.mod. It certainly won't update dependencies.
You run that when you've made manual changes (to go.mod or to your Go code), or when you want to slim down your go.sum to the bare minimum needed for the current go.mod.
And that's one common way to update a dependency: you can edit your go.mod manually. But there are also commands to update dependencies one by one.
go always requires a dependency graph that is consistent with all the declared requirements.
Which means if you wanted to update one version, it might bump up the requirements on its dependencies, and that's all the changes you see from running go mod tidy afterwards.
Manually constructing an inconsistent dependency graph will not work.
I mean, they didn't bury it far in the article, it's like a two second skim into it and it's labelled with a tl;dr. Not a bad idea in general but you don't even need it for this one.
It's usually hard to explain why proving something is hard, because it's often just: existing/known/obvious approaches didn't succeed. Not terribly satisfying. Often you just have to try doing it and see, and even that won't be satisfying.
It's scifi nonsense for no purpose other than to sound cool.
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