Elon Musk

people on twitter so mad. trying to understand why. i guess it boils down to:

1) shouldn't we fix BART / buses / systems that working class people use before building toys for rich people

2) LA-to-SF only is ridiculous, there's like a whole state in there

3) nobody wants to hear half-baked plans from an arrogant rich dude

still, i mean, it's pretty cool, right?

1) shouldn't we fix BART / buses / systems that working class people use before building toys for rich people

There are lots of problems everywhere all the time. Can't let it stop technology from moving forward.

2) LA-to-SF only is ridiculous, there's like a whole state in there

There's a whole country, even! LA-to-SF sounds like a perfectly fine beta test.

3) nobody wants to hear half-baked plans from an arrogant rich dude

Not all rich dudes are arrogant. Elon Musk has never struck me as anything close to that.

people on twitter so mad.

who do you follow?

i'm not getting that impression from all the tech ppl i follow

unveiling this while CA is deep in the hole with it's bullet-train project (something I support wholeheartedly btw) is pretty arrogant

You might be right, Johnny, dunno. I was just trying to figure out why there was this explosion of contempt all over my twitter feed after the announcement.

markers, here are some of the people that were entertainingly scathing: kalebhorton, quartzcity, tcarmody, mikesonn

i do follow tim but i guess whatever he said didn't stick

cool monorail bro

lol

i have a plan for a train that goes from boston to atlanta in 10mins, its called lasertrain and ill give you some cool drawings of it in a couple weeks, its ridiculous no one is building it btw it only costs $10

im not gonna build it tho cause im kinda busy

even i can afford that

unveiling this while CA is deep in the hole with it's bullet-train project (something I support wholeheartedly btw) is pretty arrogant

isn't his point that hyperloop would be fraction of the cost and twice as fast?

the douchey thing is that he made a big ol deal abt something thats not at all real

Which is how 70% of architecture and urban planning works.

sure 70% that sounds totally realistic too

I meant 94% sorry.

To me, it really sounds like a kickstarter project... but from a billionaire.

i mean who knows maybe its revolutionary technology but its so preliminary its p comical to call a press conference abt it

maybe this is the best way to convince someone else to give it a shot idk

LOL "elon musk"

This should keep us occupied for a while: http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop

markers, here are some of the people that were entertainingly scathing: kalebhorton, quartzcity, tcarmody, mikesonn

I wasn't scathing about Musk (I am about futurism in general) - if anything, he has a good track record on quixotic tech quests. I hope he's successful with this. I also hope there's a state left that can use it.

unveiling this while CA is deep in the hole with it's bullet-train project (something I support wholeheartedly btw) is pretty arrogant

Knowing how CA politics works (and the CA rail projects are amazingly political), how would you expect a non-arrogant to even get traction with this?

I have no doubt that Musk will solve the Hyperloop technical issues. I very much have doubts about him navigating Sacramento.

I was describing this to my wife today and kept calling it Supertube.

Bad connotations...

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/supertrain-1_7696.jpg

lol @ the "open source" pdf proposal. build a section of the thing and then get back to us when you have it working.

Musk says the Hyperloop is best for distances of 900 miles. Beyond 900 miles, he thinks you're better off in a supersonic jet.

Lol

I never use my supersonic jet anymore as parking is always a total bitch

I have to say I rather like Elon Musk. He's made a massive pile of money and rather than sitting on it or managing it in mundane ways; he's making risky bets on thinks he's passionate about: Cars, Rockets, vacuum tubes.

Hyperloop seems a bit ridiculous to me, vacuum tube powered trains and trains in evacuated tubes are an old chestnut, almost as old as railways themselves. However, he's built a commercially viable private space programme and a car company* in the last ten years so anything is possible.

*Tesla isn't really a car company it's a power train company and if it is still making cars in 5 years I'll be surprised.

ya i'm kinda ll for crackpot genius billionaires actually doing interesting stuff, up until they become str8 up supervillains obv

lol @ the "open source" pdf proposal. build a section of the thing and then get back to us when you have it working.

― wk, Tuesday, August 13, 2013 2:23 AM

he might do this

is this dude one of the crazy silicon valley libertarian types or is he just beloved by them?

iirc he has liberal tendencies mixed in w the libertarianism

xp I heard him speak and he seemed not crazy and to have some kind of social or at least environmental conscience, unlike the usual libertarian types, but maybe he's just better at hiding it

(I like him too fwiw and right now he seems one of the most likely "crackpot genius billionaires" to solve some hard problems which are overdue for solving, so I hope he carries on with that. Also hoping that one day I'll get to see/read his computer game that appeared in some 8-bit micro type-in listings mag in the 80s)

he's not as bad as some of the other silicon valley libtards, I'll give him that.

nonetheless, this is a stupid proposal

do tell

curious to read a critique that amounts to more than 'hyperlol'

I think it's dumb that he's throwing around numbers when he doesn't even have a working prototype. It just seems like he's hoping to derail the other project. I also think the "open source" thing is pretty silly since it's not like code where an individual can make some kind of improvement and test it out to see if it works. I guess an open source design is an interesting idea after the fact if he actually gets it working and other people want to build his design, but it still seems basically irrelevant.

Didn't he make his fortune with Peter thiel?
I don't know if that is "guilt by association" or "looking better by comparison"

It just seems like he's hoping to derail the other project

^^^

A key part of his criticism of the other rail plan is that it's "more expensive to operate (if unsubsidized)." I'd like to see some more detailed numbers on that though. Why would we count the cost of unsubsidized rail against air travel which is heavily subsidized? All that really matters is cost to the traveller, and unlike airlines, I'm assuming the high speed rail system is not going to be run as a for-profit business. He also makes no comparison of the environmental costs of air flight vs. the planned high speed rail system.

markers, here are some of the people that were entertainingly scathing: kalebhorton, quartzcity, tcarmody, mikesonn

― eris bueller (lukas), Monday, August 12, 2013 11:24 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm generally contemptuous of futurists, primarily because they seem to think energy and climate change problems will just sort themselves out, but a mass transit system that relies on solar power and transports people across one of the busiest stretches of highway in America is a good thing. I looked at the first two feeds you suggested and they seemed to just be saying this is just a toy for rich people, which is afaict completely unsupported by his proposal. He's not suggesting a magic carpet for billionaires; it's mass transit that uses solar power. This is a good thing! Maybe it's completely impossible hogwash, but I'd like to see actual engineering criticism of it instead of casual dismissals based on suspicion of ideas from rich people.

the main challenges are not engineering-related, their political

anybody who is over the age of 25, has lived in a city for any length of time, and paid a modicum of attention to the world around them knows that these kinds of massive public works projects tend to be underbid by shady contractors and then they go wildly over the original schedule and budget. so the fact that he's coming in saying he can do it so much cheaper with a totally new and untested technology is a huge red flag. to me it immediately suggests that the whole thing is not serious.

if he honestly thinks this is a feasible plan he should raise some funding and build a private line from LA to Vegas.

It's transparently unserious in that he doesn't want to do it himself and "regrets even mentioning it"

right, that aspect has been p funny

haha, I missed that part

ya seems like he said something offhandedly then realized abt his celebrity

a mass transit system that relies on solar power and transports people across one of the busiest stretches of highway in America is a good thing.

people don't commute the LA to SF corridor though. i have a hard time believing a transit system would fill the role of the 5 freeway. it's mostly trucks anyway.

That's pretty much all billionaires though, kinda need those traits to be one

i'm dying at this, Elon is the most pathetic of our already completely pathetic group of try-hard billionaires who should probably be 187ed.

I think in the long term the Ellison family has still been worse but he's a lot of terrible concentrated in one all-too-visible presence

elons killing of hundreds of thousands of children via doge usaid cuts def puts him at the top of the list

there's plenty of blame to go around on that one but yeah, I'll bump him up in the rankings

This article is pretty interesting both because it paints a truly dismal picture of the giant bath Musk took on buying and destroying Twitter, and also because it tries as hard as it can to suggest that maybe Twitter's still worth a lot because it feeds Grok/xAI so much data — and still comes up sounding pretty feeble.

https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/how-x-actually-makes-money-and-why-a-44-billion-bet-still-hasnt-paid-off/

X in 2026 is not a social media company trying to fix its ad business. It is a data infrastructure asset embedded inside the world’s most ambitious AI development programme, owned by the same person who controls the world’s leading private space company. Whether that convergence of AI, data and platform economics justifies the valuation is the only question that matters now. The jury remains out.

Narrator: The jury does not remain out.

I mean, if I owned an LLM, the last thing in the world I would feed it is a diet of raw X posts.

yea feel like you'd much rather train it on Reddit and other message boards where people actually try to answer questions rather than the shitpost capital of the world

twitter is free and x rivals are absolutely scraping it

i have a relative who is a self employed tech consultant hired by xAI to do something. He says it was the most dysfunctional company he had ever worked with. No one he worked with had a clue what they were doing or trying to accomplish. Employees were just rotated from Musk’s other companies. that last point really drives at home that humans are just interchangeable parts to our tech lord like Musk.

everyone’s day was spent trying to look busy

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:m7w6mfn35d53chutrzjzgkng/bafkreia7mchufpbcc6qgro2glajockefallrxnjmmfzrtp3cgpdymz556e
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:rripmnmsyo2vb4c6hccja3my/bafkreicu5evxslktfaqqcln2azqwokso4kye5vs5yp6vlvq4yyvnvi6m5y

Decapitated at the ankles

The unmitigated zoology of it!

being barrel chested used to be a good thing back in the “guys who catch cannonballs in their gut” days. Now “pigeon-chested”, on the other hand, was not good.

did we get this heartwarming story?

A federal IT staffer filed a complaint about DOGE, then went public. Shortly after Elon Musk boosted a post calling his claims false, his brake lines were cut.

https://www.wired.com/story/he-blew-the-whistle-on-doge-then-his-brakes-were-cut/

it makes me so sad to think that the amazing whistleblowers and others who put themselves on the line to fight back against this utter trash are being swept away and forgotten in a non-stop deluge of shit-coated "news" that never ends, never stops raining on us, covering us with shit until we are exhausted and helpless to remember

I still need the occasional reminder that there are still decent people

interview by jon stewart w slobodian re muskism was harder on my will to live than i anticipated. but def increased my will to fight.

bbc just considered whether spacex is _actually_ about building datacenters in space. is it? is that why we gonna public (in a not gov't sense) fund/personal profit this fucker to being a trillionaire? and really, to the extent any of this ai binge becomes too big to fail, it is public in a gov't finance sense.

datacenters in space is an unworkable idea for the foreseeable future

That won't stop Musk from promising them.

its such an outrageously stupid bullshit idea its crazy that there are people talking about it like its a real possibility

so many reasons that "datacentres in space" doesn't work that I'm not sure where to start. it's like last year when they talked about fully customisable interactive AI movies.

This from a couple of months ago was pretty good:

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/03/nx-s1-5718416/ai-data-centers-in-space-spacex-elon-musk

To go from a handful of prototype satellites to something useful is not so easy. For one thing, the power requirements of the microchips used for artificial intelligence are enormous.

To get a sense of just how much power is needed, consider the largest power-producing facility in space right now: the International Space Station (ISS).

The solar panels of the ISS are around half the size of a football field and produce around 100 kilowatts of average power, according to Olivier de Weck, a professor of astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's basically the amount of power that a single big car engine produces."

To replicate a 100-megawatt data center in space would require a facility that's 500 to 1,000 times, depending on the orbit.

"Is that feasible? Yeah, I think it's feasible, but not next year and certainly not in three years," he said.

And power is not the only requirement; the satellites also have to provide cooling to the microchips. While it's true that space is cold, it's also a vacuum. This means that when a satellite gets hot, there's no easy way to get rid of that heat — it just builds up.

"All of that heat that the computer generates has to be dispelled," said Rebekah Reed, a former NASA official now at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

The best solution is radiators, which move liquids out to giant panels where the heat can be dissipated. So in addition to solar panels, an AI satellite would need another set of large radiators.

"When you put those massive radiators together with massive solar arrays that are required in order to power and cool, you're actually talking about really large satellites, or very, very large satellite constellations," Reed said.

An alternative is to build smaller satellites and fly them in preset formations called constellations. Such constellations allow the heat and power problems to be distributed, but to work, the satellites would need to send huge amounts of data back and forth. That likely means using lasers to beam data between satellites. But even moving at the speed of light, the time it takes to get data from one satellite to another is long enough to slow down computing.

Google's Project Suncatcher proposes flying groupings of satellites in extremely tight clusters to reduce that latency. Musk, meanwhile, has proposed launching upward of a million satellites and placing them in orbit around Earth's poles. He recently unveiled the first generation "AI Sat Mini" spacecraft — with solar arrays spanning roughly 180 meters (about 600 feet) — during his presentation.

Launching all that into space would cost money — lots of money. At the moment, it can cost around $1,000 per kilogram to launch a satellite into orbit. Google believes that cost must drop by at least a factor of five to $200 per kilogram before data centers in space will begin to make sense.

$200 per kilogram?! i kept telling vader "if you can't bring the deathstar in at-or-under budget, palpatine is gonna have you audited, but using the dark side of the force"

After the SpaceX IPO he's now a trillionaire. Why isn't he helping us? He seems to have no interest in philanthropy. He could do so much good without even lifting a finger. It's evil

hi, i used to work at a satellite broadband company. there’s a big reason data on the fucking moon is a problem that’s nothing to do with power.

xp dude thinks he’s saving humanity with slave-based Mars colonies

https://www.wired.com/story/he-blew-the-whistle-on-doge-then-his-brakes-were-cut/

― Cattedrale metropolitana di Santa Maria de Episcopio, Thursday, June 4, 2026 10:18 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is insane. the coverage of this ipo made me nauseous. the full story of doge has not been revealed, but it was obviously a criminal attempt to undermine the very idea of self government. look at starbase, texas. he and thiel want to turn america into a series of gated company towns where they own everything.

yeah i mean him being -redacted- would be a benefit to all of humanity

Jon Langford of the Mekons riffing at the end of "Millionaire" during last night's performance in Rhode Island.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aivX2R8sxG8

trillionaire no more

Elon Musk was no longer a trillionaire by the time markets closed on Wednesday. Plunging shares in Tesla and SpaceX dragged the tech magnate down to billionaire status. As of 4pm ET, Forbes listed Musk’s net worth as $970.2bn.

I honestly don't understand this. Surely he isnt cash-money a billionare, isnt it all pie in the sky "money"? Isn't everything a house of cards of loans upon loans? How does that make him a billionare let alone anything more?

those data centers in space should be ready in 2 maybe 3 years

I honestly don't understand this. Surely he isnt cash-money a billionare, isnt it all pie in the sky "money"? Isn't everything a house of cards of loans upon loans? How does that make him a billionare let alone anything more?

Well he's hardly an outlier there, that's much of the world economy aiui.

Learned recently about bridging loans, which loan out high sums w/ exorbitant interest to a category of rich people known as "asset rich, cash poor".

I'd say it's a lot less pie in the sky than a month ago. Back then SpaceX could say "Well the company is divided into 12 billion shares, and Elon has 6 billion of them and we've been trading some of the rest with private investors for money and providing them as bonuses for the employees" and everyone else would be like sure, do what you want - both of those interactions would have come with the proviso that the receiver couldn't legally resell it, so they only had the value that SpaceX said they did.

And now they've said well we'll release 500 million of them on the open market, where they can be bought and sold, and we hope to raise $75b, which would be about $150 per share (I'm rounding some of the numbers a bit) and that's about what the price is, if you want to buy then someone will be willing to sell for a little higher, if you want to sell then someone will be willing to buy for a little lower. So the calculation is just that he has 6 billion shares at $150 each: $900b. Of course, if he tried selling all of them then the price would crash, but if you just want to answer the question "what's his net worth from SpaceX?" it's not arcane financial calculations: it really is just x times y.