Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX due to Tesla being a public company, so his hands are tied.
Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US. Most people just want affordable, maintainable and reliable cars.
> Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX due to Tesla being a public company, so his hands are tied.
He absolutely could do it, just like he did when Tesla bought SolarCity. It just isn’t as easy when one of the companies is public than when both are private.
We're witnessing a bailout and downloading of costs, at scale. Whether or not one buys into whatever the vision of these companies are - it's clear, there's interdealing.
Tesla theoretically now owns a chunk of xAI... whose valuation will no doubt increase due to the internalized SpaceX acquisition. Append to this a future IPO, as discussed in the artice, presumably an eventual premium of 20-50% (reasonable, 14% purely for the ibankers when this will happen)... yields to an interesting bailout situation.
To me, the real question is why. The $2B from Tesla can't possibly move the needle for any party involved in this transaction. If this were to be work 50x as opposed to a potential 50% upside (hell, make it 2x for argument's sake) it still doesn't compute. So what's the actual reason.
> Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US
So would most of EU car makers in Europe. China is not playing by the same rules and everyone with car manufacturing domestically is slamming them with tariffs.
How isn't China playing by the same rules? Every country subsidises and supports industry it thinks is important, surely nothing would stop Germany from investing into Volkswagen and BMW or the US from investing into Ford the same way China invests into BYD?
Environmental regulations around rare earth minerals needed for the batteries. China loosens them thus making it cheaper to mine which starves out all global competition that actually has tighter regulations which protect the environment.
Then of course there is cost of living and salary; both of which are lower in China compared to where most legacy auto manufacturers are.
So China can pay their employees less and pollute the environment more in order to create an affordable, very high quality vehicle.
I can understand a small amount of tariffs to help "even the playing field" but not the 100% tariff or whatever was proposed against BYD
Hm, how are tariffs state subsidies? They're a tax on some products to give other products a competitive edge, but that feels different from a subsidy?
And what does that have to do with China playing by different rules than the west?
If not for the tariffs, the domestic company would have to charge lower prices to make sales. Thus tariffs provide domestic companies with additional revenue from domestic consumers.
Tariffs and subsidies both help companies succeed, but they're not the same thing. For one, tariffs can only really help your country's companies be competitive within your country. Subsidies can help your companies be competitive globally.
He's broken pretty much all the other financial rules.... for example, the amount of blatant self-dealing he gets away with is staggering.
As long as the consequences of his actions continue to increase the paper value for investors, regulations don't really have teeth because there aren't damages. So the snowball gets bigger and the process repeats.
> Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX
Bill Ackman has proposed taking SpaceX public by merging it with his Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, distributing 0.5 Special Purpose Acquisition Rights (SPARs) to Tesla shareholders for each share held. Each SPAR would be exercisable for two shares of SpaceX, aimed at enabling a 100% common stock capitalization without traditional underwriting fees or dilutive warrants.
With SpaceX IPO set to be one of the biggest of all time, this could have a pretty gnarly financial engineering impact on both companies -- especially if the short interest (direct or through derivatives) remains large.
Why would SpaceX go public? They already have a robust enough private market to give liquidity to all of their employees and shareholders who want it. They can get more private investment.
Going public would add a lot of hassle for little to no gain (and probably a negative of having to reveal their finances).
It has been widely reported for weeks that SpaceX is planning to go public in a few months. The reason is they have big plans to run a vast network of AI servers in orbit and will need to raise a massive amount of funding. xAI merger fits with that plan. I'd assume SpaceX still plans to go public.
Was ignored on HN but here's an article explaining:
It's all BS. There is no viable way to put industrial levels of compute into a space based platform that can work within the severe thermal, power, mass/volume, radiation, reliability, and economic demands. It is just stupid smoke blowing to separate idiot investors from their money. J-school grads don't have a clue what they're parroting about.
it wasn't ignored on HN, there were many articles correctly noting that building data centers in space is a stupid stupid idea because cooling things there is infeasible
Google, Blue Origin and at least 5 other smaller companies have announced plans to build data centers in space. My understanding is the cooling issue is not the show stopper you assume.
yup, bezos said "we will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades". presumably this means they'll need huge ass radiators, so its all about bringing down launch costs since they'll need to increase mass.
Was doing some back of the envelope math with chatGPT so take it with a grain of salt, but it sounds like in ideal conditions a radiator of 1m square could dissipate 300w. If this is the case, then it seems like you could approach a viable solution if putting stuff in space was free. What i can't figure out is how the cost of launch makes sense and what the benefit over building it on the ground could be
AI datacenters are bottlenecked by power, bandwidth, cooling, and maintenance. Ok sure maybe the Sun provides ample power, but if you are in LEO, you still have to deal with Earth's shadow, which means batteries, which means weight. Bandwidth you have via starlink, fine. But cooling in space is not trivial. And maintenance is out, unless they are also planning some kooky docking astromech satellite repair robot ecosystem.
Maybe the Olney's lesions are starting to take their toll.
The shadow thing can be solved by using a sun-synchronous orbit. See for example the TRACE solar observation satellite, which used a dawn/dusk orbit to maintain a constant view of the sun.
Every telco satellite can cool its electronics. However, more than a few kW is difficult. The ISS has around 100kW and is huge and in a shadow half the time.
The cooling is the bit where I'm lost on, but it will be interesting to see what they pull off. It feels like everyone forgets Elon hires very smart people to work on these problems, it's not all figured out by Elon Musk solely.
Google, Blue Origin and a bunch of other companies have announced plans for data centers in space. I don't think cooling is the showstopper some assume.
Good call out, and really interesting. SpaceX being the cheapest way to get things into space, it seems like SpaceX is about to become extremely lucrative.
I've been thinking about this recently as I hear it often. Would people who want to buy a car in the Tesla price range really choose a slightly cheaper Chinese EV if those were available?
Personally I have a hard time believing this. But even if you had similarly priced Chinese options, I would guess the main reason for buying a Tesla is not just because you want an EV. While a Tesla will be a reliable baseline EV, surely the reason you (or at least I) would buy one is for the supervised self-driving feature.
Chinese EVs self-drive too. You can buy level 3 cars today that are cheaper, have more features, better build quality, and better reliability. Having just been in China.. yeah it’s not close they are way ahead of us and the gap is growing fast.
BYD are just affordable and maybe reliable, regarding maintenance their spares are hard to come by and are almost as hard to work with as Tesla and other brands.
I've done plenty of work on my own Tesla. It's not hard to work on at all. Parts are not even very difficult. There are plenty of 3rd party shops (such as one I went to when I needed to replace my windshield.) I really wonder why people continue to think this. It's not 2016 any more.
Tesla body work is extremely expensive. Aluminum, extensive welding instead of fasteners, substantially reduced modularity due to castings, specialized tooling just off the top of my mind.
Body work is expensive no matter what car you're working on. The presence of paint ensures it. The OP was talking about "maintenance" and body work doesn't fall under that category.
No, but I live in a country were Chinese cars have been sold since the 2010s and spare parts are still an issue. It might be an issue with their sales partners here, but many sell other brands from Korea and Japan and have no issues with them.
It's "ironic?" considering Tesla launching in China is what created the necessary supply chain to turn BYD into the powerhouse it is today. Tesla's greed will become their own demise.
Tesla cars made in Shanghai are sold in Europe and other places. That is helping them be competitive and they haven't had much price pressure until recently. Just because the Chinese have their own internal competition and deflation which drove their prices down aggressively doesn't mean it was a bad idea to build there. Also the idea the Chinese couldn't figure it out without an American company coming there first to show them is pretty silly.
Tesla Shanghai opened in 2019
BYD made their first hybrid in 2008 and they were a battery company since the 90s
Starship has a large number of critical milestones coming: Can it land and quickly reuse the upper stage? If not, it can't make refueling flights without building a dozen or two starships. Can it carry the full specified payload? If not, it can't even try to refuel in orbit. If it can't refuel in orbit, it can't go beyond earth orbit. Etc.
Everything has to go right or it will be irrelevant before it works.
> Everything has to go right or it will be irrelevant before it works.
Starship is not all of SpaceX. Saying, maybe because one hates Musk, that SpaceX is going to become irrelevant is wishful thinking.
In 2025 SpaceX launched more rockets into space than the entire world ever sent in a year up to 2022, something crazy like that.
Then out of, what, 14 000 active satellites in space more than half have been launched by SpaceX.
SpaceX is, so far, the biggest space success story of the history of the human race (and GP is right in saying that SpaceX is now a national security matter for the US).
Model S was the most successful EV. If you think cybercab is the vehicle of the future, look at the timeline of the only robo taxi in commerce in the US.
Everything has to go right with that, or cybercab will be irrelevant before it works. Same deal. Same bullshitter.
Model S was successful until Model 3/Y blew it out of the water. Waymo’s timeline is not relevant because they lose money on every car and every deployment. Tesla’s the only financially successful developer of self driving. They can scale it up much faster.In fact, instead of making $5k per car produced, cybercab will net them $50k per car per year.
Quite a few do care about the potential for job losses. On the other hand, a lot of people want cheap cars.
This dichotomy has always been in place for a huge range of specifics, both for imports and technology that makes workers less relevant. The "we want cheap stuff" argument is the one that has done best historically, though the track record of handling this badly also led to the invention of actual literal communism.
However, it is unimportant, as the main concern for your argument should be all Chinese brands combined rather than any specific brand. Unfortunately, given I'm seeing two narratives that seem to be mutually exclusive for BYD, I don't think I can trust web searches to tell me about all brands combined either.
However, even that is unimportant, as my point was more focused on the price and value for money, how Chinese models compete on AI for less cost; even to do badly in this regard (which they might or might not be given the mutually incompatible news stories I've seen) is less a narrative about Chinese market failure and more of a demonstration that hardly anyone really cares about the AI in the first place.
Tesla remains competitive in China, which can't be said of European EVs. Chinese ADAS are much better than European ones but still far behind FSD.
To bring the discussion back on topic: $50k/year or ~$250k over the course of the vehicle's lifetime, instead of $5k for a singular sale event, is why the path for the company is crystal clear. Cybercab is the same kind of step for Tesla as the Model 3 was back in 2017.
> $50k/year or ~$250k over the course of the vehicle's lifetime, instead of $5k for a singular sale event
Who will be paying Tesla $50k/year, and why?
Considering what Uber drivers take home after costs, I think this is unrealistic.
> Chinese ADAS are much better than European ones but still far behind FSD.
Not so, on both "much" and "far". Some tests put FSD ahead of various Chinese options, other tests put them behind. Tesla's FSD is still considered a level-2 system due to the failure modes it has, whereas (Europe's) Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot and (Japan's) Honda Sensing Elite are level 3. Allegedly others exist, but I'm mentally categorising those as vapourware until they ship, this is demonstrably a domain in which it's easy to fool oneself into thinking the destination is closer than it is.
Almost all businesses are more cautious than Musk, that doesn't tell you the systems are actually lower performance. The certification shows where they're at after all the smoke and mirrors, and where Tesla's at just isn't very impressive these days.
This difference isn't just a Euro/US split, most US companies are also more cautious, so same goes for Waymo who have been maintaining their slow-and-cautious approach despite what Musk keeps promising with Tesla, and operate actual robo-taxies in more cities than Tesla does.
> Ask your local llm for the earnings of a $.20/.30 per mile autonomous vehicle
I mean, I can do that in my head because 100,000 miles/year is a lot of driving even at motorway speed, and 1e5 times any cost per mile is trivial mental arithmetic, and even at 30¢/mile it still doesn't get you $50k/year/car.
30,000 miles/year is more likely, given constraints about when people most need vehicles and the relative fraction of time spent on motorways vs. urban areas, at which point 30¢/mile gets you more like $9k/year.
Also, crucially, 30¢/mile is what Waymo are already claiming as its operating cost. The reason this matters is that the moment anyone has competition on this (e.g. should Tesla actually do what they've been promising is 6-18 months away for the last decade), they don't corner the market and don't get to charge that much just because it's cheaper than a human Uber driver, they're facing off against other robo-taxi people with the same advantages who are, today, already operating in more places than Tesla are and without as much political stigma. Basically, when you get two competitors like this, it looks like the market for software and prices tend to costs; everyone in transport then only makes a profit when the demand exceeds supply, like this Monday in Berlin when my partner had to spend half as much on one single taxi ride as a monthly Deutschlandticket because of a strike action, but this kind of thing does not a business plan make.
I’ll grant you that it could be, and I’m betting it won’t while you are betting it will. The future is now obvious to fsd14 and robotaxi users. Failure is no longer likely.
This would literally only be said by a person who hasn’t tried fsd14 so do yourself a favor and go for a test ride of a Tesla and Audi/Chevrolet and report back. They are not comparable.
They sure as hell do not. SuperCruise only worked in pre mapped areas and bails whenever there's construction or deviation to plan. It's analogous to Tesla AP2 at best.
"More area" isn't "better". We're measuring by different yardsticks.
How widespread the manufacturer allows their software's use, is not the same thing as how good it is.
Sure, FSD works everywhere. But SuperCruise has zero crashes caused with 700 million miles driven. There are youtube channels dedicated to all the Tesla FSD crashes.
Let’s be honest - this is just a way to prop up Twitter/X. It makes SpaceX shareholders subsidize X, and also American taxpayers who are giving contracts to SpaceX for highly sensitive things. The government should ideally refuse to give SpaceX work unless it unwinds this.
Because Twitter/X is distorting our politics (with ann unbalanced scheme of censorship / amplification / suppression) and destroying the country by mainstreaming far right supremacist politics. Twitter/X does not deserve a single dollar of taxpayer money. If SpaceX is now part of that machine, it doesn’t deserve a single dollar either. I would rather pay more for alternatives and encourage their growth. I also look at any money given to this company as the equivalent of GOP campaign funding, so I feel it should be treated as illegal under the law.
The government is prevented from doing that by a little thing called the first amendment. "Mainstreaming far right supremacist politics" is just a hyperbolic way of saying he has politics you don't like and is exercising his freedom of the press by promoting it on the media platform he owns. Legally that is no different then the rights that every newspaper and TV station in the country has.
First of all, the current government doesn't give a shit about the first amendment and is successfully putting a chilling effect on it through various means. Both through illegally using government funding as a hammer to require independent companies to curtail their speech, or by using regulation.
Second, history will look back and realize that without taking into account the volume of your voice, you don't really have free speech in a way that matters. If you the person next to you can use a megaphone that is so loud that no one hears you, you effectively have no speech. A great many democracies implicitly realize this and thus have election spending limits tied to the number of supporters. The US, through it's lobby system, and through party affiliated control of third party networks, does not.
Actually the Trump administration is trying to strip legal status from people and deport them by way of an obscure law that gives the Secretary of State the discretion to do so if they deem those people a threat to the foreign policy goals of the US.
If these laws are still on the books when the next D administration takes over, they should use them against Elon, Thiel, etc - strip them of US citizenship, deport them, and nationalize their companies (followed with repealing those laws)
> If these laws are still on the books when the next D administration takes over, they should use them against Elon, Thiel, etc - strip them of US citizenship, deport them, and nationalize their companies (followed with repealing those laws)
Or the current R admin, next time Musk has a spat with Trump.
Would definitely be a popcorn moment; doubly so if Canada has changed its rules on citizenship by then and has also stripped Musk of that, leaving him only with South African.
Musk is, indeed, allowed under the 1st to promote whatever he wants to promote. Him being a hypocrite about "free speech absolutism" is not a crime.
However, the current US administration appears to be actively violating the 1st and 5th in a bunch of ways, the 14th that one time, and making threats to wilfully violate the 2nd for people they don't like and the 22nd to get a third term. It is reasonable, not hyperbolic, to be concerned about Musk's support of this.
I disagree. He would be using taxpayer money to boost his preferred speech. And it is essentially campaign funding for the GOP. It should be treated as such.
Shouldn't the government be aiming to pay the lowest price for the best goods and services rather than using procurement as a way to promote or suppress certain political opinions?
It’s also a way to distract from the fact that alleged pedophile and rapist Elon had 3 underaged foreign nationals trafficked to him at the space x headquarters by convinced pedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein, per the Epstein files.
If anything, I think this is actually the other way around - channeling crazy AI bubble money towards SpaceX, after the funding from goverment contracts has dried up. Twitter is just the icing on the cake.
Quite ingenious, you have to give Musk that. This is why he is making so much money.
SpaceX is slated to go public some time this year - June IIRC
The biggest selling point /was/ that Musk was being managed there, he wasn't tinkering with SpaceX like Twitter or Tesla, and his foolhardy direction was kept out of the company.
BUT, like Tesla, Musk cannot help himself and is making SpaceX look like a very bad investment - tying his other interests with SpaceX, allegedly using SpaceX money as a "war chest" in his battles.
There is also a danger that investors will see xAI as politically dangerous, which will really hurt SpaceX IPO
They want to go public, but have to sell the hell out of it in the meantime.
I'll bet SpaceX financials aren't as great as some people think. Remember, Elon was the guy who tried to take Tesla private, and talked a lot of smack about how silly it is to be a public company. All of a sudden he wants SpaceX to go public?
Musk has a pattern here - he used Tesla the same way, diverting resources to xAI and treating it as a funding vehicle for other ventures. Once he started doing that, Tesla's financials got murky and harder to trust. Now he's doing it with SpaceX right before the IPO. For investors, that's not 'too big to fail' protection - it's a red flag that the company finances are entangled with his personal empire instead of focused on the core business.
> The biggest selling point /was/ that Musk was being managed there, he wasn't tinkering with SpaceX like Twitter or Tesla, and his foolhardy direction was kept out of the company
The biggest selling point to who? Definitely not wall street
I think Musk is just that obsessed with his mission of reversing social progress and controlling the direction of the world, using the anti-woke combination of xAI and Twitter. He knows that tying them to SpaceX will hurt its IPO, but now they're part of an entity that's too essential to fail.
They're also probably rushing out the IPO to beat the bubble pop. I think everyone earlier expected to keep the bubble going a few more years, that's why they made all those circular deals. But then Trump spooked Europe into possibly scaling back US investments and decoupling from US tech. So now you have an unsure Nvidia walking back their OpenAI deal, etc.
How vital is it really to national security? Starlink will have competition from Amazon Leo in the next few months. And while SpaceX is obviously in the lead in launch capability with Starship, there are multiple launch providers capable of providing roughly the same services the Falcon 9 and Heavy provide today.
The same services as Falcon 9 are 20x the cost and launch 1/20th as much as well. That's like producing hand made good in America versus via a manufacturing line in China.
Those figures are not accurate. Other launch vehicles are currently 2-4x the cost (with comparable pricing coming online ex New Glenn), and SpaceX accounts for half of launch volume, not 20x other services. Reduce your claims by a factor of ten.
Some claim launch costs are only at 2-4x the cost but they only have a few launches or are small rockets. On a per/kg basis at best the closest competitor in the US is ULA which claims about 3x the cost but only had 1 single launch in 2025, total payload launched was about 1/50th of Spacex's total payload launched. New Glenn has had zero commercial launches. SpaceX launched 5x the mass to orbit of all other US companies -combined-, easily 20x the cadence of any other company.
Haven't you heard? Tesla is pivoting to building humanoid robots instead. They haven't sold a single one, but it toootally warrants retooling their car factories, pinky promise!
Oh c'mon now. Damn model 3 and model S I have driven were considerably lower quality interiors than an ass end Citroen or Fiat. The Model S, a 2023 model the doors didn't even fit properly. And that was all Europe.
As for FSD, nope. Unless you redefine the word reliable.
Edit: I owned a 2018 Model S as well. Literally the worst fucking car I have ever owned or driven.
> BMW actually has a reasonable control surface though, not a grand user interface experiment by some crack heads.
Really? It's one thing to hate Elon Musk, but you're talking about a lot of brilliant engineers who worked on these cars, everything from the components to the software. It's uneeded low blow just because you don't like Elon Musk.
The UX is a mess. Why does the car always label the trunk as open rather than have a button that I press to open it?
Why does cruise control sometimes change to the speed limit and sometimes not?
Why does auto lane change sometimes need me to start the manoeuvre and sometimes not? If I guess wrong and start the lane change myself, all autopilot just disengages suddenly.
I have to proove that I'm holding the wheel by wiggling it from time to time, but if I accidentally wiggle too hard it disengages. Why not have a sensor or use the cameras to detect if I'm holding the wheel?
My son didn't shut the back door properly. I started driving and the car started binging. It didn't tell me why it was binging until I put it in park and looked at the pretty 3d representation of the car, then noticed that the door was open.
Maybe if I drove more regularly I would get used to all this stuff. The car was borrowed and I gave it back.
I’m glad you found a place to get these complaints off your chest, but these are kind of hilarious. the button says “open trunk”. It’s a verb. If this is your complaint then lmao have you not seen what other OEM software looks like? Door open doesn’t just ding, it shows a warning with plain english explanation and an icon.
For the rest of your complaints you can mostly thank the overzealous EU/unece regulation which limits steering torque and requires intervention. FSD has none of those concerns, it just drives and does not require torque on the wheel.
Why are we still supporting this person? His cars are being outclassed internationally and he's directly meddling in this countries politics. He spectacularly failed (or wasn't it blatantly misled) the CA government with regard to the tunneling, and damaged the public sector while shutting down oversight and regulatory bodies against his companies.
Where is the benefit? These awesome tech demos? It just screams charlatan to me on an epic scale. I see no reason a government shouldn't step in to assume control if its "too big to fail".
Of course it isn't "too big to fail". Even banks aren't. Despite recent history large banks have failed often throughout history. There's no such thing. It may take down the supporting sovereign government (Dutch East Indies) but life goes on and new political orgs appear. People be people.
Too big to fail is a very recent modern myth. Go back 100+ years and lots of banks failed leading into the Great Depression.
Right. You do have a point, and I think Dutch East Indies is a good example, but I feel this is discussing semantics. Too big to fail, I interpret in this situation as the government having a strategic reason to keep it afloat so it will probably prop it up in case something goes wrong. This makes it have a much more stable position.
SpaceX is too big to fail for sure. If it goes bankrupt, it'll be broken down, and trimmed down to the succesful launching operation. But I don't think it's the reason it's buying xAI.
SpaceX buying xAi means that xAI shareholders are cashing in on its current high valuation. It makes it look like Musk is not very confident that xAI can navigate through the AI cycle, so he might as well sell it to rake in the profits.
But he still needs control over it because of the Tesla plan and in case something else happens in the AI field that he doesn't want to miss. So he's buying it with SpaceX, because he can, freeing some of SpaceX cash to pay himself and his xAI investors.
That he managed to bullshit SpaceX investors into buying xAI is pretty crazy. But I guess that's his main talent.
> > Boeing is too important to fail as well but it’s been terrible as a shareholder
Your opinion on Boeing being terrible as a shareholder vis-a-vis Tesla would be completely reversed if dividends and capital gains of the 2 companies were to be offered in the form of miles to be flown on Boeing planes and miles on Teslas Uber/Taxi/Autonomous taxis instead of dollars
The absolute overperformance on the stock market that Tesla has enjoyed vis-a-vis Boeing is not rooted in a concrete and tangible quality of life improvement for citizens. Not American citizens, nor global citizens for that matter.
It is my opinion that for all public companies in which it is possible to do so government should mandate payment in kind to all shareholders and board members to prevent the excessive promotional , cult and all around BS aspect of marketing to take over and allow people to profit just by riding off those, and Musk is the GOAT at that.
Im not comparing it to Tesla, im comparing it to any normal successful company (apple, google, nvidia, Exxon, whatever).
Boeing is an anemic company that doesn’t innovate and it should have been allowed to bankrupt and break off into businesses that worked and actually competed for customers.
> > Boeing is an anemic company that doesn’t innovate
The public is very afraid of innovation in anything aviation related, same goes for nuclear reactors.
If you are in those businesses you have your hands tied behind your back.
Still you'd buy the stock if the only way to get miles aboard Boeing planes were to own the stock and get paid dividends and capital gains in the form of miles.
This underscore how essential and vital Boeing is to the world whereas if you disappeared Tesla nothing would really happen
Oh the aviation world would not totally fall into wild chaos in case you disappeared Boeing overnight....no absolutely uh uh , nope , everything would be fine.
By complying with safety standards and not always begging for "Temporary Safety Exceptions" because they don't want to bring their totally outdated 737 design up to code?
What do you mean "let it fail?" SpaceX has the most profitable launch system in the world and now operates >50% of all satellites in orbit. They aren't exactly in need of a bailout.
When a company is operating at a scale where you are making orders of magnitude more orbital launches than NASA, operating a constellations of 10,000+ satellites, providing internet access to 10s of millions of people and 1 army, has raised $10s of billions in private markets at valuations in the $100s of billions, then the burden of proof is on you claiming the opposite.
The proof is that they are continuing to launch more mass into orbit than any other entity on the planet - while holding share liquidity events for their employees multiple times a year where they buy back shares. Proof is that they charge a lower cost to orbit than any of their competitors and has done so for years now.
Their revenue from Starlink is slated to be bigger than the entire NASA budget this year.
I am no fan of Musk the man. SpaceX is a strong company and Falcon is a solid vehicle. There is not a lot of competition, and NASA trying to in-source design and supply and construction of a new, reusable LEO rocket would be a complete nightmare.
I root for a competitive rocket market, but SpaceX is at the moment critical.
NASA is still here. Unfortunately, NATA fell victim to enshitification by government contracting. NASA even if it wants to simply cannot today design and launch a rocket. :(
> The private sector is far better when it comes to money.
I've heard this a lot, but I've worked for BigCos and it seems like all they do is spend money, often superfluously. I've seen BigCos spend large quantities money on support contracts every year that haven't been used in more than a decade, or sending people on business trips across the country so they can dial into a meeting, or buying loads of equipment that sits dormant in warehouses for years and then is eventually sold off for pennies on the dollar.
I'm not convinced that they're better than the government with money allocation, I think they're just better at telling people they are.
I'm not talking specifically about SpaceX, although historically the cost of their rockets have been much lower than NASA. I'm being much more general. The public sector doesn't have the same incentives that private companies have, whether it's rockets or any other technology. It's sad, but it's the truth.
I wouldn't be too sure. Depends on NASAs mission profiles and a lot of factors. Falcon heavy can bring 26.7t to GTO in expendable mode and only 8t in reusable mode. Reusable cost of Falcon is US$97 million vs US$150 million expendable.
How much does it cost to develop and maintain the reusability? Is it worth the trade-offs in lower tons to orbit due to more weight? Is it worth it adjusting the payload into smaller units, including developing things like refueling in LEO?
Idk, I'm not on the inside doing those calculations...
This. National security is one of the most abused phrases of all time.
Many companies could simply cease to exist tomorrow, including Spacex and Starlink, and the world would go on. Frankly for the better in a lot of cases.
This won’t help him. Because Elon is not important for national security. But our stupid oligarchs will soon learn the same lesson, the russian and chinese oligarchs have already learned.
That is what they want you to think it isn't too big to fail there are plenty of competitors with much stronger engineers and principles than this grifter.
Who? Finding great engineers is comparatively easy versus knowing how to navigate the DoD procurement process and having the balance sheet strength to run huge losses for ages. Blue origin might have the capital and talent, whilst Boeing has the DoD procurement locked down, but neither have both.
I'm not endorsing merely listing, but yes Blue origin.
You are correct about the issues of navigating the DoD but that isn't a reason to accept these assholes the process needs to be open to normal companies and promote standards without any grifter connections.
My personal favorite is iHP48 (previously I used m48+ before it died) running an HP 48GX with metakernal installed as I used through college. Still just so intuitive and fast to me.
I was pretty delighted to realize I could now delete the lame Calculator.app from my iPhone and replace it with something of my choice. For now I've settled on NumWorks, which is apparently an emulator of a modern upstart physical graphing calc that has made some inroads into schools. And of course, you can make a Control Center button to launch an app, so that's what I did.
Honestly, the main beef I have with Calculator.app is that on a screen this big, I ought to be able to see several previous calculations and scroll up if needed. I don't want an exact replica of a 1990s 4-function calculator like the default is (ok, it has more digits and the ability to paste, but besides that, adds almost nothing).
Calculator.app does have history now FWIW, it goes back to 2025 on my device. And you can make the default vertical be a scientific calculator now too.
Also it does some level of symbolic evaluation: sin^-1(cos^-1(tan^-1(tan(cos(sin(9))))))== 9, which is a better result than many standalone calculators.
Also it has a library of built in unit conversations, including live updating currency conversions. You won’t see that on a TI-89!
And I just discovered it actually has a built in 2D/3D graphing ability. Now the question is it allows parametric graphing like the MacOS one…
All that said, obviously the TI-8X family hold a special place in my heart as TI-BASIC was my first language. I just don’t see a reason to use one any more day to day.
I haven't reinstalled it to check how it's implemented, but I want that history visible on the screen. So that I can do 3 calculations, then look up and see the calculations and results, for instance, to copy them down somewhere.
I'd like multitasking too with multiple apps visible at once so I could copy figures easily from one app to another, like the Android I tried in 2020, but obviously that's asking too much of Apple.
I run a TI 83+ emulator on my Android phone when I don't have my physical calculator at hand. Same concept, just learned a different brand of calculators.
built-in calculator apps are surprisingly underbaked... I'm surprised neither of the big two operating systems have elected to ship something comparable to a real calculator built in. It would be nice if we could preview the whole expression as we type it..
That’s certainly an improvement - but why can’t I modify a previous expression? Or tap to select previous expressions?
What I want is something like a repl. I want to be able to return to an earlier expression, modify it, assign it to a variable, use that variable in another expression, modify the variable and rerun and so on.
Qalculate <https://qalculate.github.io/> is my favourite REPL-like calculator, although it unfortunately lacks an iOS app. It feels similar to using an HP 48-series calculator.
Numbat <https://numbat.dev/> is similar, but more CLI/REPL-focused, and with more of an emphasis on being a programming language.
I think on the numworks you can use the arrow keys to pull up an old expression. I think it would be really cool if someone built out an interpreted, nicely rendered calculator language/repl that could do variables and stuff. Might be an interesting idea
You can, but it seems to just select & use the results of previous expressions. I often want to modify & iterate on the formulas I've previously entered. Or rerun them.
I think there was a calculator like this about a decade ago released for macos, but I can't remember what it was called. Brilliant little piece of software. I assume most people didn't understand it, and it slowly disappeared.
It's a testament to the health of our free markets and competition that the winning move here is to spend a lot of time and money making your product worse for the average person.
My job is to make people who have money think I'm indispensable to achieving their goals. There's a good chance AI can fake this well enough to replace me. Faking it would be good enough in an economy with low levels of competition; everyone can judge for themselves if this is our economy or not.
I prefer soybeans. They have more fiber (including more soluble fiber), and they have more protein.
I realized this when tracking micronutrients with an app (tracking every gram I put into my body), and realized my 600 calorie steel-cut-oats breakfast was often outdone by soybeans I'd eat later in the day. The soybeans had more fiber.
And I think they're easier to eat. It's pretty boring, but I microwave a bowl of frozen soybeans and then just eat them plain. They're clean, you could eat them with your fingers without causing a mess (I use a spoon though), and their cleanliness means I'm comfortable having a bowl next to me at the computer or wherever; if they spill I would just pick them up with my fingers and that's it.
I think that's an overblown concern that mainly applies to processed forms of soy like soy milk or tofu (I don't consume soy milk or tofu). It would be difficult to consume that much of the raw bean; we're probably talking hundreds of grams of fiber per day if you tried. I'm not certain though, do your own research.
Have you eaten edamame or mukimame? These strange names refer to young soy beans. You can buy them frozen. They're a pretty good snack food. I think they're the best of vegetables.
Oats are a heavily sprayed crop as well (at least in the US). Glyphosate is also further sprayed on oats as a drying agent. Fortunately Costco sells a brand of glyphosate free oats in bulk.
China would like to have a word with you. Soy milk in particular is hugely popular for breakfast, and there's about a zillion other ways to eat it too.
Once an AI runs a single company well, all publicly traded companies will have a legal obligation to at least consider replacing the C-suite with AI. In theory. I'll believe it when I see it.
Once again the mask of "AI" is really just human labor underneath.
I've personally seen founders raise millions of dollars because of "AI" that is really just manual labor. I know, I wrote the code that enabled the manual laborers. This was like 10 years ago; the lie is even easier to tell now. And that is so so important in an economy where gaining favor from those who already have money is far better than just selling a good or service.
Back when IBM Watson was a thing, the rumor I heard was that it was actually just a big team of data people and programmers who would bang out stuff in a hurry and then they would pretend like the AI came up with it.
I've sat on many meetings and gotten to trial many "AI products", and a good portion of them do have actual LLMs attempting to perform work. Though most of them are brittle wrappers of the big AI labs, with an aspirational markup.
The AI of today can do more, yes. But the path to funding and success doesn't require actual AI use, just the appearance of AI. No need to actually sell a good or service in a profitable manner. Just convince those with money that you have some secret-scaling-AI-sauce, and you'll be a success without ever having to sell an actual product.
The founder I mentioned earlier sold the company and thanked us all for the amazing journey, and then started his next thing in his multi-million dollar house. All built on a lie that made the company look good.
I hear you, but spending an hour to research every name on the ballot come election time will make you better informed than most people.
If you want to do more, you can find some protests to participate in. Or do something other than protest like clean a local park or feed hungry people.
If I spend 3 hours on a random Tuesday consuming the news, that doesn't help anyone. It does the opposite; it makes me less able to focus, and makes me have less personal power and discipline to affect change in the world.
But when it comes to a theoretical problem we must take action even if it takes freedoms and opportunities away from normal people.
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