You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.
We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible.
(Anyone asking antagonistic questions can go ahead and save their fingers, I won't respond to the petty comments.)
Removing parasitic elements in government spending and policy will. This starts with politics. We first need a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population. All else follows. These are all things Elon actively works against. You aren't part of his future.
I don't know, government waste and most policy sucks. But there's no reason we can't do stuff or even try.
For instance, take Tesla. It wasn't anything revolutionary. Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't. Same with manufacturing in America. Every manufacturer took as given that they have to outsource manufacturing to oversees and components to third parties. But it didn't have to be that way. It takes someone naive and optimistic enough to try something different.
It's easy to forget that Tesla was made possible almost exclusively through government incentives. This is something that most people seem to have forgotten: Tesla exists because the government created incentive programs that paid in cold hard cash. Musk took advantage of those programs, and Tesla absolutely would not have been nearly as successful (and likely not existed) without it.
This is incredibly overstated. There are "incentives" for all sorts of activities. These incentives were available to all manufacturers. We should have "incentives" to produce electric vehicles and manufacturing in America. Insane not to. And these incentives are often "you would normally have to pay us X million in taxes, but we'll let you pay less". When the alternative is something not being built and no tax revenue, it makes sense. And a lot of subsidies were to buyers of EVs
> In 2019, the loss was $862 million, but for 2020 there is a huge profit of $721 million.
> However: A closer look at the figures published last week shows that Tesla is still making losses with actual sales of electric cars - around $500,000 in 2020.
> In 2020, carbon certificates brought in $1.6 billion, without this revenue the numbers would still be below red.
With a "profit" margin that jumpy and a history of unrentability, i think it's fair to say that Tesla only exists today because of subsidies. It's not just tax benefits, as you frame it, but in this case EU-CO2 certificates, a direct "revenue" stream.
The government should find ways to strategically invest in developing major industries. The market for them is global and China has/will have a bigger internal market than the US, so without intentional development we'll get a continued industrial consolidation that is bad for the US and the world. I have robotic lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners made by Chinese companies partly because an intentional policy from China's government to grow these capabilities locally.
the way the us govt has behaved internationally i wouldnt be surprised if countries/people actively boycott made in america.. the market for us goods and services would definitely have shrunk.
This is such a braindead take. Ford could have taken advantage of those same EV incentives. Any other new startup could have too. Tesla got nothing special.
> Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't
...because Tesla sold luxury vehicles at relatively low volume. By the time Elon reneged his "$25,000 EV" promise, China was ready to export vehicles that actually hit that price point. The only thing preventing Americans from driving affordable EVs is Elon's federal protectionism. Is that really progress?
So you're technically correct, but IIUC Tesla is still the most delivered (customers taking delivery) EV brand in China. Draw what conclusions you will from that fun fact
You're talking brands, I'm talking car models. And your own source lists the Model Y as the #2 best selling model cumulatively for 2026, behind only the Geely EX2 (星愿), which is a third of the price.
Also, you seem to be implying it's somehow a bad thing to have a luxury brand image with mass-market sales, but that's a pretty rare thing to pull off and it's also the key to huge margins. See also: Apple.
Look, Musk is a despicable human being, but the Model 3/Y has been a ginormous hit and it transformed the global EV market. Does he deserves all the credit for pulling this off? Of course not. But you need to stick your head pretty deep in the sand to pretend that a) it was not a success, and b) that Musk had nothing at all to do with it.
Tesla would be nothing without Musk. That doesn't take away from Eberhard and Tarpenning; they started the company after all and are great engineers. But it would be nothing without Musk.
Yep, it's crazy that people can correctly recognize that corruption is responsible for the current situation but fail to recognize that adding more corruption will not deliver us from it.
In what way? There is nothing inherent about economic freedom that leads to a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population, in the same way there is nothing inherent about a healthy, smart, and safe population that leads to economic freedom.
The US is one of the most economically free places in the world, and always has been, yet obesity is at all time highs, gen Z is the first generation to score less on standardized tests than the generation before them, and civilians killed by law enforcement is at an all time high.
Economic freedom is a very important pillar to a healthy and thriving society, but acting like it is a panacea is wrong. Economic freedom at it's extreme will only lead to a weakening of the middle class and consolidation of wealth among those holding the most wealth.
Free markets mean the only way to make money legally is to provide a product or service that other people want to buy. And people want to be healthy, educated, engaged and safe. In other words, it takes advantage of the inherently selfish nature of people to make others better off.
> obesity is at all time highs
Obesity is a choice. I know people won't like me writing that. I know it is very hard to lose weight. It's still a choice, though. I don't see how making people less free would change that.
> gen Z is the first generation to score less on standardized tests than the generation before them
The government is the primary institution that provides education, not the free market.
> civilians killed by law enforcement is at an all time high
I don't see how that is a result of economic freedom.
> Economic freedom at it's extreme will only lead to a weakening of the middle class
The US was much more economically free in the 1800s than now, and the middle class became the dominant class, by far.
> consolidation of wealth among those holding the most wealth.
Wealthy people get that way in a free market by creating products and services that other people want. In other words, they do not "consolidate" wealth, they create it.
You psychopaths won't be happy until we've destroyed the entire planet in the name profit and the "economy" will you? I wish you felt empathy and had friends that you could care about and maybe you'd realize there is way more to life than making money. Put the ayn rand book down and work on connecting with people and trying to graduate from high school.
More prosperity provides the surplus to afford being environmental. Unfree countries tend to be much more environmentally destructive, because the people are impoverished.
What's a bummer is that Walter is a smart and talented engineer, yet has a very stubborn and out of touch economic perspective that is at least half a century expired.
Just like Kyrie Irving is a talented basketball player but also a catastrophically-deluded flat-earther, it's just as possible for gifted software engineers to have flawed reasoning about the economy.
A truly free market is also free of regulation and embraces predatory actions by monopolists. Think being paid in company scrip instead of dollars. Think a single food supply monopoly with patented seeds you can be prosecuted for propagating, and harmful additives in food because it's cheaper. Think better education inaccessible for those nincompoops who weren't born into wealth. Serves them right for choosing to be born poor, amirite?
Some amount of regulation is required if you want a just, healthy, society, with economic mobility.
People say they want 100% free markets but they don't really comprehend what that looks like.
Did you know that paychecks are private money? They aren't legal tender. RSU's are company scrip, too. Besides, nobody can make you take a job you don't want.
> patented seeds
Patents are a government invention, and I'm on record opposing them.
> harmful additives
Harming and/or defrauding customers is against the law and is actionable.
> better education inaccessible
Government run schools are pretty much bottom of the barrel.
Body weight is controllable, but is not the same thing as obesity, but scientific evidence does not suggest obesity is voluntary, but I'm not trying to talk about obesity. I was just merely using it as a proxy for societal health, because I hope you can agree that obesity is not healthy.
> The government is the primary institution that provides education
I thought there was a large section of free market libertarians that want to get rid of public schooling?
>I don't see how that is a result of economic freedom.
Again, i was using it as a proxy for safety, not economic freedom.
> The US was much more economically free in the 1800s than now
The middle class became the dominant class post-WWII. wtf are you talking about?
If I have one million people pay me $1000, I am creating value, but I not 'creating wealth' I would literally be consolidating the wealth of one million people into my bank account.
Owning desirable assets could be considered 'creating wealth' due to the price of those assets going up, but owning assets is not creating products and services that other people want.
I will go back to my original point, that economic freedom is not a panacea and does not solve for health, education, and safety, but rather creating things that people want to seperate them from their money. Health, education, and safety are all more effective when provided by the government.
> The middle class became the dominant class post-WWII.
I've heard that before, and it's simply not true. Pre-revolutionary colonial America had a thriving middle class.
Consider this. A couple of decades ago, a sunken Missisouppi river steamboat was found in the mud. It had foundered before the Civil War, I don't recall the date. And so it was dug out, and researchers went over its cargo.
They were shocked to find out what the cargo was.
It was everything needed for a general store. Pots, pans, jars, knives, forks, shoes, clothing, preserved meats and candies, tools, etc. Nothing in it was for rich people, it was all meant for the middle class. And it was packed to the gills with that cargo.
If you like, look at paintings and photographs of towns in the 1800s. Do you see a couple mansions, and a bunch of shacks? Nope. You see middle class homes, general stores, all signs of a prosperous middle class.
> all more effective when provided by the government
Government providing that has a pretty sorry history.
> due to the price of those assets going up
The price of the asset is a function of its ability to create value.
Do me a favor and point to an American history book that informed your point of view. But fair is fair, I submit:
All true but the kind of alignment problem you're talking about is only possible when the core of a society is directed at inspiring, bold, massive projects. There's not much on offer as an alternative to Muskism. It's worth remembering how insane everyone thought he was for claiming you could land the rocket upright and reuse it. And even more so, that you could catch one with chopsticks.
I don't know, I'm sure you'd say Europe is a far more healthy, educated, engaged and safe place (by typical metrics), but they are not building anything like this and probably never will be able to approach anything close to it. In fact they have technologically stagnated in basically every way and are completely reliant on China and the US for technology.
SpaceX is 85% of all mass to orbit for the entire planet, then it's China, and Europe is <5%.
The next people to set foot on the moon will likely be Americans, and they will be put there by SpaceX rockets.
This is almost certainly false. The vast majority of government spending goes directly to people that need it or debt service. There is very little outright fraud as DOGE quickly learned. The only meaningful target for cuts is military. And the only solution to debt is higher taxes.
If it wasn't consolidated largely to a singular "him" we could be doing more of these, see: FDR's New Deal
By this method the money largely comes from the government and is captured into private interests, literally hollowing out the government tax base for corporate power
3,000 short term jobs doesn't put a dent in the thousands of jobs he has cut, not to mention the losses to our economy due to the tariffs, immigration policy, and deficit spending that he caused.
> We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon
I'm of the impression that you can't corrupt your way out of corruption.
Musk killed hundreds of thousands of impoverished people through the reckless and illegal wood-chippering of USAID and promotes and finances white supremacy and far-right politics around the world. This is who we should be celebrating? What a pathetic cult of personality this creep has built around him.
Personally, I can’t wait for the political pendulum to swing back hard so that he can be torn to shreds by the judicial system. (Where will he try to flee, I wonder? Back to South Africa? Will he try to pull a Carlos Ghosn? Man’s gotta dream…)
That link is from 2022 presumably about the twitter purchase. People like the guy in the link thought Twitter would go offline hard after firing almost all of the company, instead Elon was right and there was so much fat to cut.
Posts like this is why HN is made fun of now in circles where real engineering happens. In reality you would not be able to follow what he's talking about because it would be well over your head.
In reality, you would not be able to follow what he's talking about because he's making stuff up and hoping your inability to understand him comes across as genius rather than bullshit.
He was, until he took a chainsaw to things he didn’t understand.
I was a huge believer in Elon musk. I invested and made a lot of money in Tesla before Model S had even entered serial production.
Now? Fuck you Elon, go Peter Beck…
Which situation did Elon Musk put us in to? Can you elaborate? When did this situation start? What happened? What did he personally do that put us in the situation?
You could have just posted the numbers to easily make/prove your point, but you didn't, and everyone knows why you didn't. Because the numbers don't align with what you're saying. But if enough people like you say it's true, I guess that makes it true, data be damned.
Are you being serious? Are you actually not aware that Elon Musk ran the federal government department tasked with cancelling federal grants and firing government employees in 2025? How is it possible that you are not aware of this?
I looked at maybe a dozen at random, and only one seemed to have anything about scientific research. Of course, that is not a complete survey, but none of them looked important. I'm sure there are a few that are important.
I might be biased, but everything under the Division of Mathematical Sciences in the MPS directorate is important. Math is one of those weird fields that tends to touch everything else even if not directly, and it's impossible to know prima facie which areas of research will be useful downstream to the sciences and engineering.
The stuff in Airtable seems to be. The lion's share of what's there is research that has applications to, like, sensors and robotics and AI, even if the abstracts themselves don't state that, likely because the PIs behind those proposals aren't aware of those applications of their work.
(Just to illustrate how mathematicians can sometimes embody the archetype of Hans Guck-in-die-Luft: I had someone tell me once that there were no applications of ODEs or PDEs to the sciences or engineering.)
Most of the important maths research is funded by the Department of War. NSF is a good chunk, I'd have to look it up, but I wouldn't be concerned about this at all. Math is important for the war planners, always has been always will be.
Are we looking at the same link? I scrolled through a bunch of them and I could not find a single one that was NOT related to scientific research. The UI is horrible so I can't link anything on that page, but here's what I see when I click that link:
I'm not sure what situation we're in (can someone describe it please?), but did that situation only start the day Trump took office again after being elected by the American people?
Predictability is extremely important for markets and planning and general welfare. He doesn’t have to randomly declare things on a Thursday that haven’t changed for decades and create anxiety among (you name it community or industry) just to stay in the headlines.
Donald Trump has destroyed predictability, as well as any semblance of functioning, predictable government. Trump is an extremely influential and powerful unilateral executive - in all the wrong ways.
Evidence you say? I guess tariff policy and a completely arbitrary war with Iran that roiled markets, just to name a couple from this year.
And Musks money and twitter takeover did a lot of work to convince Americans vote for Trump. Then Musk joined the administration and continued digging the hole
> You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.
In the context of the US building big things, ramping up manufacturing, doing Space exploration, &c. and the person I replied to wrote:
> Musk has done a huge amount to put us INTO this situation
What situation did he put us in to in this context? Did he put us in to the situation where we are building bigger things now? Are you saying that there was a situation that we were put in to and that situation only started when Trump was elected and prior to that we were... what? Building big things and trying to restore manufacturing and now we're also doing that under Trump?
Someone here should be specific about what they're talking about instead of just "Musk bad Trump bad". Yea they're both morons or whatever but what exactly are we supposedly criticizing here? Just that Trump got elected? Ok that's a boring conversation let's switch back to talking about manufacturing and building big projects in America.
I'll bite. Things we had in December 2024 that we no longer have today, all of which contribute to the success or failure of major initiatives:
- 2.9% inflation
- Billions of dollars of grants for state-run energy projects
- NATCAST
- Healthy & stable funding for the sciences
- Competent leaders at the federal and military levels to oversee large complex projects
- Healthy partnerships with allies
Specific actions that have been taken by Trump (backed by Musk) that caused us to lose the above:
- Starting an unnecessary war with Iran
- Cancelling grants for energy projects specifically in blue states
- Imposing nonsensical tariffs on trade partners
- Starting a full-blown trade war with Canada
- Alienating other allies, ex. starting a middle-east conflict without any alliances (excl. Israel)
- Specifically closing NATCAST because "illegal"
- Gutting of science funding by DOGE & others
- Removal of competent leaders & prioritization of loyalty over competence when choosing staff
I have a hard time taking anyone seriously when they bring up anything about Trump having a positive impact on manufacturing in America. For 4+ years he's been lying to the American public about how tariffs work and claiming that US consumers paying more taxes to the US gov't in the form of tariffs is going to 'return' manufacturing to the US. We have almost half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the US - explain to me again why this is a capacity problem?
There's nothing to really bite on here - the OP said Elon Musk put us "in this situation" - I'm still looking for a definition or answer on what exactly this situation is. Is it a situation in which Trump is simply president? OK but Trump himself nor Musk are responsible for the previous decades of manufacturing capability destruction in the US, as an example.
If it's just complaining about Trump/Musk then yea sure let's complain about them in a different topic, but the OP was talking about Musk building big things and he undeniably has (or his companies have, rather).
You are claiming (or pretending) that spend (ie, marketing spend) isn't one of, if not _the_, biggest factors in which of a set of options ends up being the winner?
In this case you don't get to try the options first. You made a decision based on what you've seen and heard.
And you think the advertising budget isn't the key thing?
One such example - he's using his massive wealth and influence to support fascist political movements that promise mass deportation and "remigration", and even supporting these policies explicitly himself.
In the US, his political beneficiaries have managed to "achieve" net negative migration to the US for the first time in 50 years, and the first decline in overall population in US history.
If this becomes the new trend (and if Musk gets his political desires fulfilled, it might), the hole is getting much, much deeper while our capacity to climb out is being severely impaired.
And oh yea, he killed hundreds of thousands of kids, mostly under 5.
There's a lot to criticize, but this argument seems extremely misleading to me. The government wants to put things into space. SpaceX says "this is how much we're willing to take to do so" and bids on the government contract to do so. Notably, this is drastically cheaper launch pricing than the Space Shuttle and whatever other venues NASA had. These weren't R&D grants which are more arguable.
Few Americans have done more than musk to destroy state capacity and to enable corruption on a massive scale, all while enriching himself to an unprecedented degree. That's great for him and his cronies that he has gotten so wealthy doing it, but he's been a huge net-negative to most humans.
I get that rockets are cool and a lot of people in the tech bubble think that starlink is the greatest thing ever, but most people don't care about that nearly as much as they care about seeing their children die from preventable diseases he cut the funding for or getting violently ill because he drove thousands of food inspectors and researchers out of a job.
Handling the enormous federal debt that he continues to play a part in worsening is going to very painful in the long run.
So where is the guy who is respectful to the government and compliant with regulations that is out there building millions of EVs, rockets, and massive satellite constellations? If he existed I could respect your argument. But in reality the only guy who seems to be able to build a modern mass manufacturing company in the US is the trillionaire who runs roughshod over all forms of government oversight that gets in his way. That should tell you something about where the problem lies here.
Elon Musk isn't the problem, he is the symptom. The problem is that it is basically required to be ruthless and corrupt to get anything done in this country at the scale, price, and timeline needed to be commercially viable. The solution is less regulation and bureaucracy, not more.
I think the root of the problem is “vetocracy.” We’ve created a system where small minorities can hold everything up, sometimes for ideological reasons and sometimes for financial reasons. The classic case of the latter is homeowners opposing all home construction to raise their property values, but it happens in other areas too.
Vetocracy isn’t democracy. It’s a tiny minority having veto power.
So yes the only person who succeeds in such a system is a human battering ram who can just bash their way through it by being a manic asshole with insane force of will.
There should be tons of Elon Musks, including nicer ones, but nice people get vetoed.
Lol why is this downvoted? There is no dispute that he spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Trump and seat himself in government while his companies are financially dependent on government programs and contracts. This is an obvious conflict of interest, and also completely on par with all of the other corruption we're seeing from this administration.
Exactly. I actually laughed out loud at OP's comment. Elon Musk has never done anything to benefit the broader "us." The idea that "we" need people like Musk to "dig us out of this situation" --a situation that rich men like Musk put us into in the first place-- is absolutely ridiculous.
Billionaires don't "dig" anything except the foundations for things that are going to make them even more money.
No it won't. Separately other countries don't get to dictate our internal policies or whether we decide to build any sort of missile defense system. If we're going to be nuked over it, then oh well they'll get nuked too. Never can we live as hostages to wanna-be dictators and tyrants (Xi Jingping, Vladimir Putin, IRGC, &c.) and if they want to blow the whole world up then so be it but acquiescing to their bullying is simply not an option. If you think it's an option, then we should issue our own nuclear threats and take them hostage instead.
Is your cognitive dissonance that strong that you don't see that if all major countries follow that line of thought all have to have their own golden domes and invite WW3?
I don’t think that’s an appropriate use of the term ‘cognitive dissonance’, but suffice to say, no, if the US develops the Golden Dome as currently described there is no danger of all major countries also developing the same technology and then starting World War III.
How does everyone having golden dome invite WWIII? We can't shoot missiles at them, so therefore let's go start a war with them? What sense does that make?
And if we do, how are we going to fight them? By shooting missiles at them?
I wish he kept a lower profile. His public behavior risks overshadowing the work SpaceX is doing, work that could benefit humanity in ways we can’t yet fully anticipate. I wish we had more Elons pushing us toward a "future that looks like the future," as he said.
If we just don't talk about the blatant racism, the nazi salute, or that rampage about removing brown people from jobs they didn't deserve, it might stop being such a huge problem. Sure buddy.
But its also hard not to be. I'm not a fan of Musk and it doesn't even have to do with Musk himself as its a common theme I see among a lot of the big tech companies or really any company doing a big project in my neck of the woods. An hour north east of me, there has been big on going data center projects for 10+ years. Sounds good right? I got a lot of family and friends in the trades. But I can almost set my watch to it. When work ramps up, its always good pay and 15 years of guaranteed work until suddenly its not. 8 months go by, suddenly everything is paused and all those contractors are out of work for a year and a half until things start up again. Then its rinse and repeat.
"I almost sold a car today, but if I did, sure it would have been some income, but who knows when the next time I would sell another car would be? Why bother? It's rinse and repeat"
These comments are so strange, because you’re demonstrating how far your head is in the sand, willfully.
Of course Musk talks big. He is almost always late. Lots of things have never happened, or have not yet worked (but they’re still trying)
At the same time he has monumental successes that nobody, ever, has achieved.
Worlds safest car (multiple times) worlds highest selling car (model y), car of the year, massive factories building at a speed and quality that made Toyotas CEO say they’re in trouble and have a lot to improve.
The whole supercharger network that smashes every other one.
World’s first reusable rocket, done it 300 times now. Only two others have done it once. By far, by far more launches than every country and company in the world put together. Starship coming along.
To say that he never does anything is a very, very strange set of blinders to view the world through
>At the same time he has monumental successes that nobody, ever, has achieved.
"Nobody ever" doesn't really feel accurate here.
>Worlds safest car (multiple times)...
According to which body? Tesla's interpretation of NHTSA data? Some other organization? Did other cars prior to Tesla's inception obtain this title "multiple times"?
>... worlds highest selling car (model y)...
In 2023, the Y peaked at ~1.22 million. In 1923, the Model T sold ~2.09 million.
>... car of the year...
Numerous bodies label things "car of the year", and many cars were named that before and after Teslas were produced.
Please provide a list of all the companies that have reused a first stage booster many times.
And all the companies that have launched more to orbit in a year than everyone else combined.
> According to which body? Tesla's interpretation of NHTSA data? Some other organization? Did other cars prior to Tesla's inception obtain this title "multiple times"?
August 2013 (Model S): Tesla announced that the Model S achieved a 5.4-star rating from the NHTSA, noting it was the highest score ever recorded at the time.
February 2017 (Model X): The NHTSA gave the Model X a 5-star rating in every category, making it the first SUV with the lowest probability of injury.
August 2018 (Model 3): Tesla published data showing the Model 3 had the lowest probability of injury of any car tested by the NHTSA.
September 2022 (Model Y): The Model Y earned record-breaking safety scores during European testing, achieving the highest overall safety score recorded by Euro NCAP at that time.
December 2024 / 2025 (Model Y & Model 3): The IIHS awarded the Model Y a Top Safety Pick+ designation, while Euro NCAP named both the Model 3 and Model Y as "Best-in-Class" safety winners.
January 2026 (Global NCAP Wins): Euro NCAP and ANCAP crowned the Model 3 as the safest Large Family Car and the Model Y as the safest Small SUV under updated protocols.
> * In 2023, the Y peaked at ~1.22 million. In 1923, the Model T sold ~2.09 million.*
Safe to say the model T had a lot less competition in 1923 than the Y does now. Clearly it’s a bigger achievement now.
> Numerous bodies label things "car of the year", and many cars were named that before and after Teslas were produced.
Tesla were the first electric car to win coty and be highly praised as having a chance to make EVs mainstream. I don’t know how old you are and if you remember, the Model S was nothing like we had seen before (I’m an automotive journalist, FWIW)
I want to be clear: I don’t care about Musk as a person.
I care about facts. I care about achievements.
Just the same as saying Israel is committing genocide is not antisemitism, saying Musk has achieved incredible things is not caring about or supporting him.
Both cases are simply stating facts without any judgement or show of support/not support.
How convenient. You have to ignore him on a personal level to be a supporter like you are. Because you know he's a repulsive individual on every level. And if you didn't qualify your support for him you'd debase yourself.
It is factually true that Elon Musk has a reputation for saying things will happen that do not end up happening. Picking out some things that you like about him and posting them while excluding the dozens of publicly documented examples of him either lying or (very charitably) being so “hopeful” that he’s disconnected from reality is indistinguishable from volunteering support.
If your Tesla (made by a company he took private at $420/share) makes you passive income as a robotaxi while you sleep, which you spend paying off the loan you took out in 2020 for the ticket to Mars that you bought to avoid covid which ended up being pointless because nobody got it past April then I’d understand being confused about his reputation. If not, you kind of just posted a roundabout way of saying that you don’t care or notice when he makes stuff up.
As both you and I said, Elon talks big and has failed to deliver on a ton of things
That does not mean he has achieved nothing incredible.
If John Carmack or Tim Cook or Henry Ford said they were going to make cheap, reliable fusion reactors in every home but never did, they would still be the legends they are for the things they did do successfully. The things they didn’t do don’t change what they did.
Man if this actually starts to happen it's a good time to be a welder, concrete worker, or any general contractor or tradesman in Louisiana. Coastal Louisiana is some of the poorest areas in the US even more so than the valley in Texas where Starbase Texas is located. Probably 10-20 years worth of solid work building out that site.
Hmmm. Aquire all these properties under the guise of reviving things for racing and oopsie it failed what ever shall we do with all these properties now? Oh yeah do what we do best – build data centers.
These types of allegations are extremely common with basically every type of construction project, especially when contractors know the client has deep pockets. None of this has been adjudicated by a court. Plus this story is written by someone with bluesky link in their bio by a publication that has an obvious bias:
>Elon Musk Just Said Something About AI That’s Literally Incomprehensible
>Sure, man.
It's so interesting to me that the whole "futurism" concept got co-opted into some sort of political propaganda machine. All the articles are negative hit pieces, they're all reductive, they're almost all political in nature. I used to go on the futurism subreddit years ago and it's all the same there. You'd think "futurism" would be about .. promoting new technology, ushering in the future, you know .. futurism. Not just another political propaganda outlet.
Futurism is a focus on the future. The future may be good or bad. Your desire to focus only on the upsides (for you) and not want to hear about the consequences, externalities, or dangers is one of the most "political" positions a technologist can have.
Do you hate reading most science fiction? Because the ratio of dystopic to utopic scifi is pretty unbalanced.
Yeah, I hate modern science fiction. It's almost all terrible. Sci-fi written in the time of actual ongoing world wars and the Cold War's constant threat of instant nuclear annihilation was far more optimistic, and far more imaginative.
Classic sci-fi was far from universally optimistic, it had more optimistic pieces than we do today but I'd still say on the whole it was more dystopia than utopia. Even for its own time, the original Star Trek was considered uniquely optimistic, though a large part of that is that its just much easier to write a good story where the setting itself provides the necessary challenges for a story to work, rather than an optimistic setting which rules out a lot of the usual challenges. Even Star Trek struggled, a good chunk of its stories are about encountering a race or civilisation without that utopia, turns out telling a good story without any conflict is pretty tough, especially a long running one.
But it does more generally reflect how society views technology as a whole too. People are generally a lot more pessimistic about new tech now, myself included, we've seen time and time again how its used to control or squeeze us. There actually was a Star Trek episode, "The Game" (season 5, episode 6) about an addicting device you could compare to smartphones (though the device in Star Trek doesn't spy on you to sell your every move to advertisers, missed a trick there), and that certainly wasn't supposed to be an optimistic look at technology, so you can see why things have gone the way they have.
Yeah for sure, science fiction used to be optimistic and utopian, like Planet of the Apes, Brave New World, Frankenstein, 1984, Earth Abides, The Martian Chronicles, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and Island of Dr Moreau, We, Farenheit 451 ...
Recently I have read fiction where someone discovers a spaceship/artifact/portal/alien/mcguffin/etc and then they... get the mcguffin, get more stuff, get the girl, win. The plot is just a straight line.
they're boring.
Although not a straight line, any superhero movie. they're predictable and therefore, boring.
So I found the stuff that used to fill me with wonder, I shy away from. I don't want to watch another marvel hero.
I kind of wonder if non-utopia scifi, with reality and struggles and character development... is that the good stuff? doesn't have to all be dark forest or enshittification++ though.
You could just say “no” - it would save a lot of space, be about as polite, and way less annoying.
Sometimes people want to talk about science stuff without talking about human fallout and political implications. It’s perfectly fine to want an occasional break from those types of discussions.
Talking about "science stuff" without even mentioning the political and human implications is pointlessly incomplete. It's like trying to talk about a programming language without mentioning variables.
Everything is human and everything is political. To pretend that it is not is, in itself, a political stance.
Let's take the two pieces you put out there and just look at logical conclusions., because it's kinda hilarious to imagine you actually hold this actually-insane position.
1. Everything is political
2. Talking about something without mentioning political and human implications is "pointlessly incomplete"
Topic: "Anyone wanna go swimming?"
Normal people: "Sure."
You, apparently: "Are you aware of how water is unequally distributed throughout the world? How can we possibly discuss swimming if we aren't willing to discuss the political fallout? This is pointlessly incomplete."
Next panel, you're just researching local water table rights while everyone else is swimming and having fun
Nope, just showing how ridiculous it is to hold the position that everything is political. It's okay to just talk about things casually, dude. Chill out, it'll serve you well.
If your position isn't that everything is political, don't say it is. If it is your position, this is perfectly in line with what you stated.
That’s Italian futurism, which was a specific movement. I think the term was being used more broadly here.
Go find some Soviet space art, or mid century American “space age” stuff, or less dark forms of cyberpunk / cyber culture from the 80s and 90s. None of that is fascist yet all of it is popularly called “futurism.” I’ve even seen the term associated with solarpunk.
As popularly used it means more or less the idea of trying to use human intellect to build or create something fundamentally new, or roughly that. It’s not a precise term more of a vibe.
Mid century American and Soviet space art had transparent political purpose, as does solarpunk. Futurism is rarely if ever just "it's the future, and that's neat!". It comes with the inherently political baggage of "We got from where we are to the glorious future, by way of (ideology)". Star Trek is a great example of this.
That could be said about everything including things usually not associated with futurism like romanticism. Everything carries at least a little political baggage.
I was responding to what seemed like the implication that futurism was fascist.
That’s just a microcosm of everything. The culture war ate the entire public discourse to the exclusion of practical concerns and even coherent ideas. It’s all vibes and tribalism and bashing the other tribes, while the tribes themselves become increasingly incoherent in terms of what (if anything) they really mean or stand for.
I just turned it all off, though it makes me fear for the future. Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.
> Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.
Strongly agree, there is hardly any intelligent discussions with diverging opinions left anymore. People are too deep into their own propaganda, agenda, and echo chambers. Peak bullshit is near.
Okay but Musk himself deliberately and continuously uses his companies and wealth to participate in the culture war so it's no surprise it comes up when his companies do.
He could switch off and stick to building rockets and electric cars. It's very easy (notionally) to just not post on Twitter.
I live around a lot of those people in SW Ohio who find themselves traveling to states like Louisiana for welding, electrical and general contracting work because the expertise isnt there. I have to imagine much of the same will happen and if anything they might reap rewards following construction. Regardless I would assume little to no relevant expertise exists there at the moment.
One thing about construction trades is that they will hire apprentices. Someone needs to do the grunt work, and they learn on the job (or in class if they are union) and eventually become productive or wash out.
tl;dw -- louisiana has a ton of natural resources and wonderful harbors, but has allowed corporations to get away with almost anything without paying their fair share of taxes, cleaning up their waste, or generally being held accountable. And likely related, there is a long history of rampant corruption in the area. With sea levels rising and cancerous pollution filling densely populated areas, life in Louisiana has generally become very difficult :(
I haven't had time to watch the video but my understanding was a lot of the Louisiana coast have big problems with rising sea levels and much of it in the process of falling underwater. Perhaps it's relatively trivial to reinforce the coast for the forseeable I don't know.
The plans for the site involve extracting significant amounts of natural gas to make methane to burn for the rocket fuel. If they hit the launch levels they suggest (thousands of launches per year), this is not a small amount of greenhouse gases they'll be emitting which of course helps accelerate melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels, which could threaten the very site they've built it on.
They're also the folks working on the largest co2 -> methane converters in the world. Because that's how they'll need to make fuel on Mars, and no one else on earth wants to fund an expensive technology to replace an inexpensive gas pumped from the ground. By definition, these reactors will have to be capable of producing enough fuel for a rocket in order to be fit for purpose. That opens the door for carbon neutral operation. It's tough to imagine a greener rocket than a fully reusable one that's carbon neutral running on methane. Sure beats spewing hypergolics or solid rocket fuels.
What are the chances they'll employ cheap labor they can just use as election fodder for stealing hard-working american jobs?
Either that or pay decent wages for American workers that'll drive up construction prices and worsen the inflation which is already crazy due to these criminal tariffs.
They put themselves in that situation, the US admin, not me. I'm just commenting. Or is any of what I said wrong? I mean there's something called ITAR that requires American workers, but that doesn't mean the impact on inflation isn't real
That's a very narrow view of inflation. If you increase wages, there's more demand for goods, more demand means higher prices which means higher inflation. Same with tariffs, they are paid when importing goods, which is passed onto the consumer, resulting in higher prices and thus inflation.
It's the only correct one. For proof, consider the inflation that happened when Spain looted gold from S. America, then during the California Gold Rush, then the Yukon Gold Rush.
it doesn't fix everything wrong in the state but it's > 0. There's a lot of additional economic activity that comes with the construction too. Restaurants get busier, Walmart gets busier, lots of auto repair/servicing will be needed etc. Som e people will move for construction and end up staying there. It can be a shock to the local communities though but i think the positives still outweigh the negatives.
The biggest issue is these kinds of construction jobs are temporary. It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over. Starbase will require more people on site at least.
The construction is temporary but what are the economic impacts of having a fully operational spaceport that launches 20,000% more tonnage to orbit than the Florida Space Coast?
Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.
One would think the same thing about having some of the biggest chemical manufacturing and refining industries around and yet the people of Louisiana are some of the poorest in the US.
Tons of money flowing through the state. Just to a select few people who own the plants for the most part, not for the people working there day to day. I don't see why one would think that would change.
>It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over.
The issue with Datacentres is that you cant model the advantage of lower colo costs on jobs in the area.
The problem is that some people dont want to permit anything unless they can measure the benefits, when the market doesnt always work like that.
The whole "temporary jobs" line is completely irrelevant nonsense. Sure, it's correct, but who cares? The alternative is zero. It's not like there is only a limited amount of undeveloped land and a bunch of people bidding for it. And of course those jobs don't stick around after construction is over. They're construction workers. They move on to the the next construction job.
Sounds like "legal language" threshold for whatever reason? The Terafab announcement used the same phrase:
>The initial phase of Terafab is estimated to require approximately $16.8 billion in capital investments from SpaceX and Tesla, with potential future expansion phases bringing total investment much higher. This facility will employ at least 3,000 people, many of whom will be from Grimes and nearby Brazos County — continuing the trend of our other Texas sites where between 60% and 80% of new hires are local residents.
That Starbase concept (not that the numbers are realistic by any means) is orders of magnitude more ambitious than what SpaceX does today with 22k employees.
Nope, it won't. Won't stop the government from advertising the failed California high speed rail, either. But I think Musk is more likely to deliver on Optimus.
Debatable. Optimus will be programmed by watching thousands of YouTube videos and by indexing the entire NEC. It is entirely possible that a single Optimus can be a master welder, electrician, and HVAC technician. What Optimus can't do is take responsibility for the completion of the work as being done to code. Nor is it clear how much Optimus will cost to buy or operate.
Underestimating humanoid capabilities is a mistake; the real challenge will be the economics and the flow of responsibility. But imagine a future where every structure built has a pov video documenting its construction. I don't like the implication for the trades any more than I like the implication of Claude for putting me out of work either.
Latest LLMs that have good visual understanding (Gemini and GPT) are able to tell if construction work is up to code. You can give it a picture of electrical wiring, plumbing, framing and it will tell you if it's up to code with very good accuracy.
These guys have been popping up on my instagram bragging about how much money they're making building DCs and any argument they get between their "Im making $350k/week, what're you getting, lib?!" is defended with "Well all your instagram comments are stored in datacenters, and you didn't cry then!"
They have no idea what they're actually building, of course. I just love the comparison of a webhost/telco pop to Manhattan sized gigadcs that require nuclear power plants or blasting gas furnaces.
The level of cynicism, shit-talking, and schadenfreude wish-casting in response to this is crazy. Start cheering on successes. Resist the deconstructionist mindset.
Is it realistic to demand a spaceport with no environmental impact from anyone, SpaceX or not?
Current launch technology inevitably produces a lot of heat and noise and we don't have any rocket model that wouldn't at least rarely fail (and explode).
That said, extant Cape Canaveral does not seem to be lifeless. Lots of birds. IDK how the precise species composition has changed since 1960, but nature as a whole is a lot more resilient than people seem to think.
1) Political - The ideology/party spreading the doomerism promotes that they're the ones that can "fix it", if only you vote for them.
2) Adversarial countries, primarily China - Using the internet to convince members of western civilization to hate their civilization, hate their economic system, hate their history, hate their compatriots, adopt a no motivation defeatist attitude, etc., etc., and they can get our population to destroy itself from within without having to go to war with us.
Reject the doomerism, reject the negativity. Build. Invent. Create. Do your part to contribute to your civilization, to contribute to humanity, to move us forwards.
The people who build rockets and computers and the Internet are the good guys of history. We should do more of that. That statement shouldn’t have a political valence—people who subscribe to that idea can argue whether taxes should be higher or lower. But if you reject that concept you’re rejecting civilization itself.
It has a political valence when one party is campaigning on punishing and stopping them from building. "Should" is a meaningless word unless I have agency to change that, and I don't.
"The V-2 rocket (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, lit. 'Vengeance Weapon 2'), with the development name Aggregat-4 (A4), was the world's first practical, modern ballistic missile and suborbital launch vehicle.[4] The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Nazi Germany as a "vengeance weapon" and assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings of German cities."
Nazi's are the good guys only when they work for the U.S.
3) Elon Musk has fascist leanings and many people don't want to live in a world where such a person has ever increasing wealth, influence and power. Especially since he has no qualms about using that same wealth and influence to subvert and distort elections, both domestic and foreign.
They're pretty well known for lawlessly purging bureaucracies of experienced, civil servants loyal to the rule of law, to make way for cronies and regime loyalists.
They're pretty well known for scapegoating and persecuting immigrants and minorities and "enemies within" - and engaging in political projects to imprison and/or eject them from the nation.
Musk didn't cut government spending. Legally, only congress can do that. They increased spending. 10s of billions of that spending has gone to towards a mass build out of prison camps where many people, citizens included, are being held in horrid conditions indefinitely without due process and without being charged with any crime. This seems to be a project that Musk supports.
Elon Musk is mostly a bad person. I do not want mostly bad people to succeed. Why is that hard to understand? You either do no think he is a bad person, or ignore the fact he is.
I'm capable of understanding people are multidimensional and capable of both good and bad things. it's possible think someone is a bad person while understanding that not literally everything they do is evil. this project being successful will improve the lives of thousands of others would you rather the project fail and have things stay the same?
Is it a good time though? - Their Texas suppliers have been chasing payment and Greg Abbott rolled over and let Elon get their property without payment. Not the only Tesla/SpaceX vendor not being paid either. https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/cars/tesla/tesla-cybertruc...
Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO) Access: Launches into SSO have a launch angle of ~98° relative to the equator (i.e. south), and launching from Louisiana gives a direct launch corridor over the Gulf of America without crossing major cities.
SpaceX plans to launch millions of datacenter satellites in SSO, so this is the perfect launch site for their use case. SSO launches from their existing launch sites (Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral) would overfly land.
Existing Methane pipelines: They are next to existing Gulf Coast natural gas/LNG infra, making bulk liquid methane delivery significantly easier. Currently for Starbase, there are no pipelines and methane is shipped in via truck. Delivering the ~1,000 metric tons of methane required for a single Starship launch requires 50-60 tanker truck deliveries.
Debate used to be the staunchest form of resistance. This last decade, racing to call the opposition a crybaby and declare it activism seems to be more in vogue.
Nope, nobody I know has ever called it that. Don's latest spat has him wanting to change Lake Ontario to Lake of America. I did get a good laugh out of that because of how petty it is.
Yes, it’s much easier to buy people off and legally “persuade” them out of their homes when the local economy is depressed and they can’t afford a lawyer.
people getting paid an order of magnitude more money for their property and yet people like you will find a reason to complain. Where is this coming from? Some anti-capitalist, degrowth thing? Genuinely curious
Typical "everything is bad" response.
This is going to employ thousands of blue collar workers for years. Reasonable environmental protections will be in place. It's not going to become some barren toxic waste zone.
I wonder if anyone read the copy on this page or if it mostly came out of an LLM.
The "Restoring the shoreline" and Rebuilding the marshlands" paragraphs below the images are almost exactly the same. The first sentence is exactly the same.
Maybe, but there's some very specific legal language that cpra and the state requires everyone use in referring to some of these issues, and at least part of the land SpaceX is acquiring is involved in coastal restoration lawsuits or deep water horizon settlements or both.
As an engineer working on cpra projects in the past, I've wanted to reword a variety things but was forced to use their legal language.
It's mostly a good thing as it keeps things properly defined in a political context that are meant to have specific technical meanings (like marsh, beach, rebuild vs restore).
For me that makes it more likely to be human-generated. Seems like a "rushing person juggling revs and copy-pasting" mistake.
FWIW, the writing style and tone match pre-LLM SpaceX writing. Of course you can prompt an LLM to mimic style, but somehow the regression-to-average blandness shines through. That can be hard to distinguish from bog standard corporate speak though.
Lol this is a reference to Florida (though I love your Space Ghost reference), we have the Kennedy Space Center, and an Airforce base (I guess its a Space Force base now) which has led to this area being referred to as "Space Coast" adding this in case anyone else might be unaware.
Read "Building a new space coast" and I immediately wondered what our elected officials here in Florida must have felt when they saw that line. I'd love for SpaceX to greatly expand their presence here in Florida, but at the same time the coast is probably too built up here for SpaceX to have a facility like that unless they go into the panhandle.
I'm sort of projecting (I've been here most of my life, I got tired of it, now regaining appreciation for Florida the last few years), but I've also noticed others (not you) don't realize there's more to Florida than most people realize.
I grew up in South Florida (not a native), and my experience of strip malls and ever widening highways is: if there was a state below Florida, that's where the desperate and unrooted migrants would have kept driving to.
I spent my childhood fishing in a swimsuit every day I could. I loved it. But as an adult, any south of Ocala and east of Gainesville is a cultural wasteland (with cutouts for Miami and Tampa).
Grade school level Louisiana info (probably somewhat wrong): It's generally brackish marsh/swamp land. Basically think silt/dirt with a bunch of plants evolved for this specific environment.
Then you take a bunch of humans and you cut down all the really old cypress trees for lumber. To facilitate that process you cut channels through all the plants that are in the way so you can ship that lumber via new unobstructed waterways. You also do it for oil/gas exploitation.
So now you have a lot of infiltration of saltier or fresher water and less protection during storm surge and such. Lots of plants die and these plants were holding the dirt/soil in place (and the storm surge helps wash that away).
Also you re-engineer the original waterways that deposited silt/dirt and helped build these areas up so that they deposit silt/dirt in other places (also you harvest the silt/dirt for use in farming so it never even gets that far down the waterways in the first place).
In the Netherlands we rely on beach grass, a type of grass that can root well in loose sand, to keep dunes together. This forms the main sea barrier. The grass has historically been replanted at least partially to maintain the protection. This spans back at least a few hundred years I believe.
It's interesting that Lousisana works so differently. I always kind of assumed that dunes would always be needed to keep the sea out in low lying areas, but that's not the case at all.
Terrestrial datacenter legal restrictions are how SpaceX expects to make a lot of its money in the next 10+ years, so I would be less surprised to find them lobbying for restrictions than against, presuming they spend at all on it.
It's not a zero sum market, supply is nowhere near meeting demand, in the short term restrictions also hurt SpaceX because they are building out their own terrestrial datacenters in Memphis etc.
It's just a ploy anyway, to get billions from the government through no-bid contracts. Doesn't matter what they build. Or if it even gets built, which I doubt it ever will.
From the hype video, it looks like they will be building towers in pairs. Hard to tell the distances, but if one explodes on the pad, will it's pair be in the blast radius? I'm guessing the plane will be to have a launch on one them and then move to the other for a faster launch cadence?
It’s hard to imagine that Cocoa Beach/Titusville isn’t receptive to this. I guess it’s probably cheaper? They don’t have to share the airspace with NASA and other launch companies and it becomes a fully owned and operated Freeport for Musk’s ventures.
State of Louisiana was probably on their hands and knees begging. The construction would last decades and anyone with a strong back that can be told what to do and do it will have a job. It would help lift a lot of people in that area out of poverty.
logistically, i wonder how long it takes to ship from Starbase Texas to Louisiana via barge. It has to be easier to get Starships to Louisiana than the East side of Florida.
They may not have to ship many or any. The first launch of a Texas-constructed Starship could just land the booster in Louisiana for a small fuel penalty, and then ships could likewise land there.
> It would help lift a lot of people in that area out of poverty.
It's not gonna help us do shit. It will line the pockets of the usual wealthy Louisiana oil barons and politicians similar to the Meta Datacenter that got backed door approved by our politicians.
Crazy how they’ll get you to work for free, but I guess that’s your prerogative. Most people charge for their labor, and money > no money, even if the money you do receive wasn’t equally distributed.
No expert - but from what I've heard, Florida and Texas are constrained for efficent polar (North/South) orbit launches due to restrictions over populated areas. Whereas Louisiana has the Gulf to the south so no/fewer restrictions to worry about.
It's for sun-synchronous orbits, almost assuredly. This is for space data centers.
Man, I was hoping they would pick Alaska (as it's even better for launching into those orbits) - we could really use new industries other than just resource extraction, but Louisiana makes a lot of sense, I just am surprised that there's actually the available land there to do this. Interesting.
> as it's even better for launching into those orbits
When the weather agrees, yes. Sooooo many launches are scheduled around weather patterns and are affected by weather delays - I'd be shocked if LA didn't have 3-4x more 'launchanble weather' days on average compared to Alaska.
I'm sure we'll get to the point where we can launch and land without regard to weather outside of the extremes, much as we have with air travel, but we are far from there today.
Totally this is reasonable, but, I flew in AK (and a couple thousand hours in the lower 48 too) professionally for over a decade, there are other advantages up here? Not nearly as many thunderstorms up here.
Icing might be a problem? I would expect there to be basically no reasonable icing accretion possible well before max q? But I'm not sure because that's not my field.
Regardless, if we're going to be building data centers in space to avoid NIMBYs, we can build rocket infrastructure in Alaska to avoid NIMBYs too. And other infrastructure too? Maybe. I know the SpinLaunch lunatics (I mean that in the most loving way, I love that crazy idea even though it seems insane to me) were getting some sort of permit to launch from Adak. I have been out there a few times and I wish we would try to build more infrastructure out there too... with the NW passage being more traversable due to global warming there's could be a lot more infrastructure there too.
Icing? Watch slow-mo video of any cryogenic liquid-fuelled rocket taking off; you see a shower of ice shards falling off when the engines start.
Liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants are loaded at cryogenic temperatures -- boiling point is -183C for O2, -161C for CH4; SpaceX does some amount of subcooling so the propellants may be even cooler than that.
Ice accumulation while just sitting on the pad is a given, even in tropical climates (the water just freezes out of the air). Might even be a greater problem in (say) florida or louisiana than in Alaska given higher humidity.
Well, my thought would be on the way up? Like, you punch into the first layer and get icing on the nose of the rocket?
That would largely be my only concern up here, and turbulence? I don’t know how well large rockets do in rough air? That said, cape chiniak is on Kodiak and some of the absolute worst “turn you nearly every way but loose turbulence” I’ve ever seen has been down wind of terrain around ADQ? But going up that seems like less of a problem, or only a problem for a few dozen thousand feet?
I’ve accumulation on the forward end of the rocket and associated drag was what I was thinking.
Regardless, I’d really like to see more space industry stuff up here.
I mean, I'm just speculating? But yeah, I'd be willing to bet serious money (well, in a way, I have) that this is why. Sun-synchronous orbit is something like 7 degrees off of a purely polar orbit? Something like that? So a big southerly coast is extremely valuable for this sort of operation.
I would absolutely love if we were building launch infrastructure up here. We have tons of open space for it, Cape Chiniak is "fine" but kind of remote. What I wish we would do is put some launcher's on the road system, or close to it, then build out our own space infrastructure here in AK. We really need something other than just resource extraction up here and asteroid mining and space manufacturing is going to be particularly bad for the Alaskan economy. Once it's cheaper to get a big rock from space, or battery tech gets just a little bit cheaper, the economy up here is in deep trouble.
My little startup is trying to do build some tools up here for local airlines using AI, and I'm able to make money at it? Which is cool - there's not a huge amount of technically talented people here compared to Seattle or the Bay Area, but there's still smart people in these parts, we have resources, and we have available land and permissive building rules. That is so crazy valuable in a world where NIMBY rules everything down south. Like, obviously I don't want them drilling for oil in DNP, but you know, I have been to and worked in the arctic, I'm pretty fine if we were building things up there, or on these remote Aleutian islands, or in these relatively empty and uninhabited/uninhabitable places.
I wish these companies would look north to build. There are some Nimby d-bags up here, but there are FAR fewer of them than any other place I've ever lived. For context on a hyper micro-scale, my driveway permit outside of Anchorage for our cabin was handled for free with a friendly email to the borough and them wishing me luck. Obviously, other people's mileage may vary, especially for things like giant projects, dams, mines, etc. but the burden here is so much less - you can almost just... feel it. Despite being "harder" to do things up here, it's remarkably permissive.
Maybe when my little startup is more capable and I've got more money coming in, and I'm spitting out drones from my little machine shop, maybe I'll be able to do more?
Whether they make economic sense or not depends on launch costs. With current operational rockets (such as Falcon 9), the launch costs are too high for space compute to be profitable. All these projects depend on Starship succeeding. If you read Starcloud's white paper[1], they make the case that space data centers can be cheaper than terrestrial ones because of access to 24/7 solar power. I think failure is more likely than success for Starcloud and similar startups, but conditional on Starship lowering launch costs, it does look like the idea can make money.
If orbital compute fails, it won't be due to heat issues. Current radiators are around 8kg per square meter, and each square meter can radiate close to 1kW. So a 1 megawatt satellite would need less than 40 square meters of radiators weighing around 300kg. And that assumes there won't be any improvements in radiator efficiency.
The outcome is almost entirely determined by launch costs.
You need both enormous solar panels and radiator panels.
1MW needs about 7000 square meters of solar panels. This would require 1,500 square meters of radiator panels along with a lot of coolant pipes that have to be kept edge on to the sun at all times. And all of this will require thousands of kilograms of structural support.
What sort of solar panel gets only 140 watts per square meter in space? Even with efficiency as low as 20%, you'd get 1 megawatt from 3,700 square meters. And you'd design the satellite to minimize heat transfer between the panels and main body, because panels can run at higher temperatures than the computers. Since heat radiation goes up with the 4th power of temperature, the panels would not need large radiators. In most satellites today, a coating on the back of the panel is all that is required.
Edit: Oh wait, you're the guy who makes bold claims and then refuses to bet on them because you know you'll lose money. 10 months ago you said, "no Tesla has EVER driven without a driver with Tesla assuming liability for crashes. And I don't think they ever will."[1] When I tried to get you to bet money on your prediction (which is now false), you ignored me. A few months later, you said, "Tesla doesn't even have the permits to operate Robotaxis in California and probably never will because they are actually stricter vs Texas."[2] and again I tried to bet you that Tesla would have Robotaxis in California before the end of 2028, and again you refused.
I really wish HN had a way to mark or mute users, because if I knew who I was replying to, I'd collapse the thread and not waste my time engaging with you.
I'm sorry, but you do not know what you are talking about. If you'd read the Starcloud white paper I linked to, you'd see that the plan is to put satellites in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit, meaning they would be in constant sunlight and the backs of the solar panels would radiate to deep space. No orbital compute project is planning to put satellites in an orbit where Earth blocks the sun, as that would require large battery banks to power the computers while in shadow.
Launch costs need to decrease by a factor of 20 to 30 for orbital data centers to make sense. And even then there are enormous issues with irreversible radiation damage.
A hypothetical operational space data center will cost a multiple over a similar terrestrial facility. It would be cheaper/more efficient to offer a municipality or its citizens a fraction of that multiple to secure approvals, now that the bullying approach is running out of steam.
Instead of installing MWs of illegal gas generation and also still causing local electricity rates to spike, why not arrange to buy down the electricity of local ratepayers and also comply with existing laws & regulations?
It's worth asking why operators aren't doing that yet. I suspect it's because neither OAI nor Anthropic have an extra $50B-$100B to put out at the moment. We'll see what happens post-IPO.
Never going to happen. Yeah, we might get to a point where lots of people object to them in lots of places. But nobody allowing them anywhere? Mongolia wouldn't let you build in a little corner of the vast steppe? Algeria wouldn't let you plop down in a nice patch of unused Sahara?
The worst that would happen is that it becomes difficult to build in convenient places. That certainly would be annoying. But the problem with space as the solution is that space is by far the least convenient place imaginable, with the possible exception of the bottom of the deep ocean.
I know it sounds bananas, indeed I thought it sounded bananas for a long time, but in a world where we can't get high speed rail built anywhere because of permitting, and there's an artificial scarcity of available land to build, they make a lot of sense.
In space you can just start. Nobody is really going to stop you.
People are going to be even more pissed off when there are more satellites than stars
(I know nominally they’re not visible but they are shortly after launch while moving into position, and at large scale that would be happening all the time, not to mention the other side of burning up in the atmosphere after a few years)
If trying to do it terrestrially is because the city council will riot then doing it on orbit seems like the better play. Just saying.
“I can do it in this challenging environment or I can not do it at all” is kind of a false choice if you think AGI is imminent. Personally, I think we’re already there for KVM stuff, it’s just the goal posts are accelerating at an exponential rate the same with the capabilities.
"If you think AGI is imminent" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The rate of improvement has already leveled off significantly and there is little-to-no evidence that LLMs are close to or capable of achieving general intelligence.
If you assume we aren't going to create a singularity in the next few decades, then no, it doesn't make sense economically to do it. Even ignoring that we'd have to develop a design that works in space, and even if SpaceX is able to significantly reduce cost per kg to orbit, it would still cost 15-30x more to build the same data center, and you have to pay that premium every time a piece of equipment burns out.
It would be cheaper to build aircraft carrier sized ships to hold them or give every adult in the town where they are building a couple million dollars to fuck off. And again, that's only if SpaceX can produce an as-of-yet mythical level of scale. If they stop anywhere short of that, then we're talking about billions of dollars to build in space what you could build on earth for tens of millions.
Everyone says this about the rate of improvement every month, and yet, I'm not just basically conjuring the code into existence that's paying my bills and building my company. Personally, I know it's just my anec-data, but I'm pretty much convinced that for kvm work, we're already there or extremely close to agi in any meaningful sense.
Seems geography constrained. There's wetlands sure but how much they re allowed to build that out, vs LA where any effort to keep the state from shrinking as it does seems fairly welcome.
I expect Musk picked Louisiana because it has some of the weakest corporate regulations of any state and will probably let SpaceX get away with almost anything.
Because as China has shown, people get angry when you drop hundreds of tons of steel and propellant on people.
Rockets sometimes fail. SpaceX has one of the lowest failure rates in the industry, but that's still ~0.5%. When they fail near launch, they cause humongous explosions. Because of this, anyone with even a tiny bit of care for people launches over the ocean, so that when it goes oops, it only harms some fish.
The existing launch sites SpaceX uses are good for launching into prograde (Starbase, TX and Cape Canaveral, FL) and retrograde (Vandenberg SFB, CA) orbits, but they are all either unable or kind of marginal for launching into polar/very highly inclined orbits. (Starbase, TX cannot do it at all, Vandenberg SFB, CA has limitations on when you can launch, and Cape Canaveral, FL needs to fly a dogleg which reduces performance.)
Part of their plans for the space datacenters involve launching a lot of mass into sun-synchronous (which is very highly inclined) orbits. For that, they need a launch site with the ocean either to the north or to the south.
It doesn't. It doesn't even need to be built, since the Stennis Space Center is already there and already has an excluson zone. This is a vanity project.
Not all the money is going towards salaries.
I imagine that steel and concrete cost quite a bit in the specific configurations required by the project.
> Starbase, Louisiana will be built to support thousands of Starship flights a year. This self-sustaining spaceport will have propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport.
Sounds really neat, but "incredibly ambitious announcement" from an Elon Musk company is starting to wear thin.
Is this real, or will it join the graveyard of other incredibly ambitious projects that were eventually abandoned to focus on the next incredibly ambitious project.
I can count plenty of incredibly ambitious announcements from them that have turned out amazing! In fact, they are an outlier in how many they have challenges they have taken on and succeeded in.
[x] Partially reusable rocket that dropped cost to orbit by an order of magnitude. And no, the space shuttle (while an amazing piece of engineering), doesn't really count. It cost a billion+ to refurbish and did nothing to make space more accessible. Now we have businesses that exist purely because the Falcon 9 exists. Heck, the entire new space industry got validated (and hence got investment) due to SpaceX's success.
[x] Returning human spaceflight capability to the US at a fraction of the price, using the same reusable rocket platform after the old defense primes failed to do so. And then making it cheap enough that it has now also flown about half as many private missions as it did for NASA.
[x] Global satellite constellation providing gigabit-scale internet with 10000+ satellite (once written off by "experts" as yet another "incredibly ambitious project" that will never happen).
[x] Commercializing and bringing down the cost of electric cars to the point where they are actually a viable option now (unlike the compliance cars made by OEMs 10 years ago).
[x] Building the largest rocket to ever exist that now has a clear path to being the first ever fully reusable launch vehicle.
[x] A BCI implant that has now brought back mobility and communication ability to multiple patients with debilitating conditions.
Given that each of these were things that no one had done successfully before, or had failed spectacularly - I don't really care that they took longer than initially planned.
There is, in fact, a graveyard here. It is mostly filled with confident predictions that his companies would never do the things they have since done.
Both things are true. Musk's companies have done quite a few remarkable things people didn't think were possible, and Musk overpromises to an absurd degree and has left a trail of abandoned projects in his wake.
People often cite Hyperloop but he explicitly said he wasn't going to build it himself. They often cite FSD but it is far from abandoned and is driving my car today. What other projects are you thinking of which are actually abandoned? The Tesla solar roof is the biggest one I can think of, I think it's fair to count it as abandoned. I guess the project to make building bricks out of Boring tunnel dirt didn't pan out either, seems pretty minor though.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/888053175155949572 "Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins." (July 2017, years after saying he wouldn't build it himself.) Technically it's not a commitment to build, but any other leader in the market would be considered to have failed if they made such a statement and then quietly abandoned it.
Yeah under that post he also says "If you want this to happen fast, please let your local & federal elected representatives know" and "Still a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly". Not just "technically" not a commitment to build. Clearly dependent on other factors.
Go ahead and count it as "abandoned" if you want. He did talk about building a Hyperloop and is not currently pursuing it directly. But I think failing to win required government approval/funding is a bit different than capriciously giving up on an idea, and The Boring Company itself is far from abandoned. Very different from the solar roof which is unambiguously a commercial failure.
Feels a bit like saying I can provide lots of free electricity, if someone just gives me some perpetual motion machines. Political viability is as important to building something like this as the laws of physics are.
TBC's continued existence isn't very relevant; the point was they/he have yet to build a lasting, full-scale hyperloop, despite his statement they would try. He stopped trying, and I'm fairly sure government approval is far from the only significant obstacle to making a functional and profitable hyperloop anyway.
I might even let go of the hyperloop concept, if they built something else of DC-NYC scale that beats the alternatives in a few measurements.
Boring company maybe? It's not abandoned, but they likely gave up the idea of an underground system of roads under a city, and just focus on single project individually like traditional construction company.
It's far from abandoned. They're actively building TBMs at their factory and tunneling in Vegas and it's pretty different from any other transportation project I'm aware of.
DC to Baltimore tunnel, LA tunnel network, Chicago airport tunnel. New Roadster, possibly Tesla Semi. Battery swap stations. “Alien dreadnaught” factory with no humans on the production line. Dragon 2 propulsive landing. Self-driving ought to qualify at least partially, because although the project continues and is doing quite well, a huge number of cars were sold with hardware that was promised to be capable of it and turned out not to be.
TBC is still pursuing government permits and contracts to build tunnels. Not having succeeded in every case is not the same as abandoning the project.
The new roadster is delayed, not abandoned. It's known to be in active development and is very likely to be demoed this year. Wrong timeline but not abandoned.
The Tesla semi is on the road daily and the factory to build large quantities is almost complete. They're hosting a "factory inauguration" event next month. Certainly not abandoned.
Tesla has already committed to replacing hardware as necessary on cars that purchased FSD in the past so that they can run unsupervised as promised, after Tesla has unsupervised FSD working. Certainly the timeline was wrong but again, clearly not abandoned.
The DC tunnel was billed as a hyperloop, so it's not good faith to both excuse him for never intending to build one and also claim it takes time and will eventually succeed.
Did TBC ever pursue government permits and contracts for the DC tunnel? The nonsense "verbal govt approval" they mentioned makes me skeptical of the whole thing.
New Roadster is over six years late and has basically gone silent at this point. Maybe it'll still come, just extremely late, but I'm very skeptical.
Semi might be real, we'll see.
If cars that were built with AP2/2.5/3 get upgraded to unsupervised FSD, I'll eat my hat. They don't even know what hardware will be needed yet and some of those cars are now a decade old.
I'd be happy to take a bet on Roadster or Semi. As for older AP versions, Tesla will either be upgrading those cars or providing significant compensation to owners who purchased FSD, and I'd bet on that too.
Wait, is hyperloop not a Musk failure because he never said he would build it, or is it not a failure because his company is still building it? You've said both.
I see my logical flaw and agree (to the specific arguments about tunnels made in this subthread), though I made an adjacent post showing Musk later expressed intent to build a hyperloop in DC, so you can't also say he never claimed to try.
SpaceX is the most successful Musk company because it is the one he has the LEAST direct involvement with. Compare SpaceX to how Musk is causing Tesla to crash and burn.
Gwynne Shotwell is the actual reason SpaceX is as successful as it it.
Can't believe you forgot about Mechahitler and the CSAM creation robot! And the AMAZING hyperloop! And FSD is coming next year now (back when he said it in 2016, and every year since)!
Wow! Was there a Musk company dedicated to building that? Where is the press release announcing it? Surely it must have been a big deal if you are so excited about it's failure!
> And FSD is coming next year now
It is already here. You can hail one right now in multiple cities.
And in my own car, I use it every day and have for 2+ years. For the $3k I paid in 2019, I definitely got what I paid for. It's also gotten dramatically better since then. It drives me to and from work every day without having to so much as touch the wheel. And there is no 2018/19 non-Tesla that can do what it does.
So yes, by all means, keep listing the things you think prove Musk is a fraud. You're mostly just making my point for me.
He often promises incredibly ambitious things that don't happen. But, with a fairly reasonable frequency, he promises incredibly ambitious that do happen.
For example, SpaceX is responsible for a massive spike in orbital launches [1].
SpaceX and Tesla are both successful companies doing really impressive things, but the more ambitious claims are almost always silently discarded.
Including robotaxis, tesla semi-trucks, hyperloop, optimus, roadster 2.0, cheap whole home batteries, true FSD, Mars landing, nueralink, and more I'm sure.
It is difficult for me to get excited about a decades long, ambitious project when the follow through rate is <10%.
He is definitely overly optimistic on timelines but pretty much all those things you mentioned are actually still happening, it's too early to say they haven't followed through.
considering how the capitalism the chosen framework of the westoid works. i will be watching it (burn and fail) with popcorn and my turkish coffee while enjoying fine persian carpets. this will be loaded with corruption and greed and will fail. I am taking bets.
Great place to put a star base for all the reasons listed, but, uh… does anyone buy for a second that Elon Musk gives a fig about the Louisiana coastline or the migratory birds?
Isn't this an absolutely horrible idea to build this here? What happens when the next Category 5 hurricane hits this area? It's an absolute certainty that they will get another Category 5 at some point.
You won't see any lines close to land near Cape Canaveral. Though to be fair, Vermilion Parish seems to be far enough west in Louisiana that it doesn't get direct hits either (but some are close).
Cape Canaveral is mostly 0-3 ft with some >3 ft. Meanwhile the entire immediate coast for the new Louisiana SpaceX location is >6 ft to >9 ft.
I think they'll probably have more a lot more trouble with storms than Cape Canaveral. The dynamics along the Atlantic coast are a lot different from the Gulf.
The Florida coast isn't defined by a huge, meandering river. Take a look at some satellite surveys that showcase how the Mississippi River changes over time. We've of course damned up the shorelines upstream where people live in places like New Orleans so there's no inherent seasonal risk of mass flooding, though of course lose the deposited silt and hence further erode the land we've "saved". Further down south toward the mouth, it's marsh land defined by however the river chooses to meander. I'm not sure where exactly SpaceX is planning to setup in LA, but the entire coastline there is chronically very poor, very unpopulated, and not supported to weather flooding of any kind, especially not hurricanes.
Pecan island is 40 miles away from the nearest distributary of the Mississippi (the Atchafalaya river), and there are several towns (and a highway) in between. It's the ocean & weather that erode the coastline in that area, not any rivers.
The distance from the Mississippi's flow or mouth is irrelevant compared to the sediment that flowed out of it before levees forced it to exit the way it does today.
Erosion from that decision was already an issue 50 years ago; weather events accelerated the pace, but so have upriver dams that cut off sediment supply, and also shipping canals that have carved gaps into it that push surges further inland than they would otherwise, and also the chéniers that diverted floodwaters regardless of cause into more fragile marshes, and also farmland that was in active use as far south as Pecan Island up until Rita salted it, and also 50 years of oil-industry support infrastructure, and also the Deepwater rig explosion that leaked oil that killed off marshes (the settlement of which is how the state ended up capable of awarding this land), and also rampant invasive nutria that negated efforts to use agricultural fresh-water discharge to reverse previous damage.
People seriously need to value this thing realistically. Otherwise we are handing the money required over to a raging narcissist who plans to launch hundreds and thousands of rockets, each one burning KEROSENE or methane... For what? Live on mars? Aykm? Starlink? Nifty but I get unlimited 5g 300 Mbps unlimited for 8 euros a month. And does starlink work inside? What else? Does nobody else see it as kind of strange that humans with all of our technology still have not figured out a better way to power a rocket with kerosene or methane? And we're powering the most cutting edge computing AI using.... Fossil fuels.
Space exploration is a pipe dream and fantasy that billionaires hope to have up and running just in time to "escape" the world they have helped destroy.
I agree mostly with your stance, but I still have to downvote out of principle for the whole "prove me wrong" statement at the end. Hate that argumentative tatic.
I have nothing against humans becoming multi-planetary but this is a luxurious desire at this point in history. We should solve poverty first. This is the kind of project which you do once there are no more problems to solve on earth.
From 1990 to 2025, the number of people in extreme poverty dropped from around 2.3 billion to roughly 831 million. I think we're making fast enough progress here to warrant public companies going to space on their own dime and volition.
I wish Musk had stuck to bullying his employees instead of going after everyone, because SpaceX is still building a more interesting future. Although that apparently involves pouring concrete in a wetland.
> Pecan Island and nearby wetlands are high-value habitat for migratory waterfowl, shorebirds, wading birds, and other coastal wildlife. SpaceX is not developing the full footprint of the land and will preserve wetlands and wildlife habitat.
Pretty cynical corpo-ambiguity-speak, even by Musk standards.
We're supposed to be happy they're promising not to develop one-hundred percent of the land footprint? They will leave at least 0.00001% of land area as wetlands and therefore we oughta be happy?
Such empty bullshit it's more insulting they even put an environment-leaning section on the site. Just say "fuck it, our space fetish is more important than the wetlands."
Many industries, and SpaceX particularly, will say this like this, then a couple years later be like "oh, it's actually much easier if we destroy it", _do it_, then claim "oh well, nothing to be done now!" and push forward on something else.
"Promises" or "commitments" like this need to be evaluated based on the previous behavior of the people "making" them (although they were very careful with working to not use either of those words, and just imply them)
I agree, and the premise is that we're supposed to believe the remaining waterfowl are going to coexist peacefully with... rocket launches?
Evolution has done stranger things, but my bet is that the birds will find somewhere else to be over learning to not be startled by nearby earth-rumbling explosions.
The wetlands around Cape Canaveral/Kennedy are thriving. Men with guns prevent people from getting too close to the rockets, and people do far more damage to wetlands than a rocket launch once every few days.
A rocket launch every hour or so as SpaceX is promising might be quite different.
Good point and thank you, I should have specified ongoing/constant rocket launches.
The Solar City timeline should have taught us everything we need to know about these astronomical projections... they couldn't even throw enough billions at solar panels that kinda look like roof tiles to get them to work, and the same cabal wants us to think the next step is space travel and terraforming?
Building multi-decade service life infrastructure on the coast in this era of the Anthropocene actually requires you (from an engineering point of view, not merely a regulatory one) to have a buffer zone of wetlands, marshes and sea walls to absorb storm surges.
You can still choose to read that cynically, but I think the cynical angle is taking moral ecological credit for a pragmatic engineering reality :P
To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that this project is ecologically beneficial or neutral (I think that part is beyond debate for many reasons including the noise pollution you've identified)
I was just trying to say that the marshland restoration stuff is likely not lip service, insofar as they actually do need wetland buffer zone to keep their launchpads above sea level.
I used to be interested in SpaceX development. Then I came to the realization that SpaceX is going to be used primarily for the militarization of space: hauling space based weaponry, weaponry drop ships, surveillance satellites, etc.
I still feel glad for the SpaceX engineers and scientists who succeed and doing new and innovative stuff. But their employer is just like every other military contractor sucking on the unlimited teets of the US Government. What a waste of taxpayer money.
I grew up in during the Cold War and I'm sick of this shit. America always thinking it has to dominate any country that doesn't bow down before it.
It will be comms mostly, and mostly civilian. That other stuff will happen, but it'll be dwarfed by the effort of supporting several tens of millions of Starlink users.
Just because you personally prefer to be subjugated doesn't mean anyone else does. That necessarily means being able to defend yourself from bad actors, and history has proven the best way to do that is by investing in technology.
Generally, the way this works is that the richest person gets to whatever they want because they own the people who write the rules, and the people with less money have to abide or change.
I wonder if we're at the point where this shoreline critical infrastructure would need more physical security / protection from the drones of adversaries.
Feels like an impossible project that will end up being 5% of what was advertised (the 5% being what was actually planned all along), but is made with folie des grandeurs to pump a stock who's hype has died down.
I wonder how coastal they intend to be. They make a lot of claims about repairing the wetlands and coastal regions, but a lot of it is likely going to be underwater in the next 25 years because of rising sea levels [0], regardless of how many wetlands are repaired. And I suspect infrastructure like this probably has to be usable for something like 100 years to payoff. Maybe they're actually going to build inland, where the eventual coast will be?
This was my question as well. If they’re as close to the shore as the picture makes it seem, they’ll be underwater with the first Cat 1 they come across, and huge cat 5s are becoming more and more common as time goes on. I wouldn’t want to invest here because how will you keep those 200 foot tall structures standing in 150 mph wind??
> infrastructure like this probably has to be usable for something like 100 years to payoff
I don't think so. Likely the pad with last 10 years max.
In any case, I highly doubt that but in any case sea level is almost certainly going to rise below a meter. Filling a meter higher with sand is a pocket change for this project.
It’s easy to be pessimistic about Musk timelines/ big tech but I am thrilled that ambitious, real world, hard projects are happening in the US again.
You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.
We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible.
(Anyone asking antagonistic questions can go ahead and save their fingers, I won't respond to the petty comments.)
Elon-types won't "dig us out" of our mess.
Removing parasitic elements in government spending and policy will. This starts with politics. We first need a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population. All else follows. These are all things Elon actively works against. You aren't part of his future.
I don't know, government waste and most policy sucks. But there's no reason we can't do stuff or even try.
For instance, take Tesla. It wasn't anything revolutionary. Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't. Same with manufacturing in America. Every manufacturer took as given that they have to outsource manufacturing to oversees and components to third parties. But it didn't have to be that way. It takes someone naive and optimistic enough to try something different.
It's easy to forget that Tesla was made possible almost exclusively through government incentives. This is something that most people seem to have forgotten: Tesla exists because the government created incentive programs that paid in cold hard cash. Musk took advantage of those programs, and Tesla absolutely would not have been nearly as successful (and likely not existed) without it.
> It's easy to forget that Tesla was made possible almost exclusively through government incentives.
If it’s so easy, where are the other EV companies?
This is incredibly overstated. There are "incentives" for all sorts of activities. These incentives were available to all manufacturers. We should have "incentives" to produce electric vehicles and manufacturing in America. Insane not to. And these incentives are often "you would normally have to pay us X million in taxes, but we'll let you pay less". When the alternative is something not being built and no tax revenue, it makes sense. And a lot of subsidies were to buyers of EVs
> In 2019, the loss was $862 million, but for 2020 there is a huge profit of $721 million.
> However: A closer look at the figures published last week shows that Tesla is still making losses with actual sales of electric cars - around $500,000 in 2020.
> In 2020, carbon certificates brought in $1.6 billion, without this revenue the numbers would still be below red.
https://www.electrichunter.com/ev-news/tesla-makes-money-co2...
With a "profit" margin that jumpy and a history of unrentability, i think it's fair to say that Tesla only exists today because of subsidies. It's not just tax benefits, as you frame it, but in this case EU-CO2 certificates, a direct "revenue" stream.
The government should find ways to strategically invest in developing major industries. The market for them is global and China has/will have a bigger internal market than the US, so without intentional development we'll get a continued industrial consolidation that is bad for the US and the world. I have robotic lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners made by Chinese companies partly because an intentional policy from China's government to grow these capabilities locally.
The current administration is literally cutting all those strategic investments
the way the us govt has behaved internationally i wouldnt be surprised if countries/people actively boycott made in america.. the market for us goods and services would definitely have shrunk.
As much incentive as the oil & gas industry receives?
The biggest miracle of Tesla is that they somehow got liberals to argue against government incentives for electric cars
... against Alon, not EVs.
This is such a braindead take. Ford could have taken advantage of those same EV incentives. Any other new startup could have too. Tesla got nothing special.
What was the incentive and was that specific to Tesla?
> Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't
...because Tesla sold luxury vehicles at relatively low volume. By the time Elon reneged his "$25,000 EV" promise, China was ready to export vehicles that actually hit that price point. The only thing preventing Americans from driving affordable EVs is Elon's federal protectionism. Is that really progress?
The Model Y has shifted over a million units every year since 2023 and sits at the top of many "world's best selling car" rankings.
Obviously it's not a cheap car, but it's still mass market, not luxury.
It's only mass-market in the US because of subsidies and tariffs. Chinese EVs change the equation entirely.
Outside the US protectionist bubble, Tesla is seen as a luxury brand and their inability to deliver a $25,000 EV doesn't help.
As of March 2026, the Model Y is the best selling car in China.
https://teslamagz.com/tesla/model-y/tesla-model-y-becomes-ch...
Also South Korea, Australia, the EU, etc.
No it's not. It was the most sold during March, but that's it.
Local sources (https://www.autohome.com.cn/hangye/showroom/) tend to show that it's Xiaomi / Geely that's leading the race in 2026.
Additionally, sales numbers doesn't correlate with the brand image of Tesla : it is a luxury brand, no matter how you put it.
So you're technically correct, but IIUC Tesla is still the most delivered (customers taking delivery) EV brand in China. Draw what conclusions you will from that fun fact
You're talking brands, I'm talking car models. And your own source lists the Model Y as the #2 best selling model cumulatively for 2026, behind only the Geely EX2 (星愿), which is a third of the price.
Also, you seem to be implying it's somehow a bad thing to have a luxury brand image with mass-market sales, but that's a pretty rare thing to pull off and it's also the key to huge margins. See also: Apple.
Look, Musk is a despicable human being, but the Model 3/Y has been a ginormous hit and it transformed the global EV market. Does he deserves all the credit for pulling this off? Of course not. But you need to stick your head pretty deep in the sand to pretend that a) it was not a success, and b) that Musk had nothing at all to do with it.
I guess it's to Tesla's advantage that unlike most manufacturers, they don't make a million different models which end up dividing sales.
> It takes someone naive and optimistic enough to try something different.
You mean Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, right?
Tesla would be nothing without Musk. That doesn't take away from Eberhard and Tarpenning; they started the company after all and are great engineers. But it would be nothing without Musk.
And it would be nothing without Eberhard and Tarpenning
We just need more leeches.
Yep, it's crazy that people can correctly recognize that corruption is responsible for the current situation but fail to recognize that adding more corruption will not deliver us from it.
This is toxic logic. We need many things. There is no single fix for our diverse set of problems.
> We first need a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population. All else follows.
The requirement is economic freedom, from which everything follows.
In what way? There is nothing inherent about economic freedom that leads to a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population, in the same way there is nothing inherent about a healthy, smart, and safe population that leads to economic freedom.
The US is one of the most economically free places in the world, and always has been, yet obesity is at all time highs, gen Z is the first generation to score less on standardized tests than the generation before them, and civilians killed by law enforcement is at an all time high.
Economic freedom is a very important pillar to a healthy and thriving society, but acting like it is a panacea is wrong. Economic freedom at it's extreme will only lead to a weakening of the middle class and consolidation of wealth among those holding the most wealth.
Free markets mean the only way to make money legally is to provide a product or service that other people want to buy. And people want to be healthy, educated, engaged and safe. In other words, it takes advantage of the inherently selfish nature of people to make others better off.
> obesity is at all time highs
Obesity is a choice. I know people won't like me writing that. I know it is very hard to lose weight. It's still a choice, though. I don't see how making people less free would change that.
> gen Z is the first generation to score less on standardized tests than the generation before them
The government is the primary institution that provides education, not the free market.
> civilians killed by law enforcement is at an all time high
I don't see how that is a result of economic freedom.
> Economic freedom at it's extreme will only lead to a weakening of the middle class
The US was much more economically free in the 1800s than now, and the middle class became the dominant class, by far.
> consolidation of wealth among those holding the most wealth.
Wealthy people get that way in a free market by creating products and services that other people want. In other words, they do not "consolidate" wealth, they create it.
You psychopaths won't be happy until we've destroyed the entire planet in the name profit and the "economy" will you? I wish you felt empathy and had friends that you could care about and maybe you'd realize there is way more to life than making money. Put the ayn rand book down and work on connecting with people and trying to graduate from high school.
I've never read Ayn Rand's books.
More prosperity provides the surplus to afford being environmental. Unfree countries tend to be much more environmentally destructive, because the people are impoverished.
> there is way more to life than making money
I never wrote otherwise. You're making things up.
What's a bummer is that Walter is a smart and talented engineer, yet has a very stubborn and out of touch economic perspective that is at least half a century expired.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright
Just like Kyrie Irving is a talented basketball player but also a catastrophically-deluded flat-earther, it's just as possible for gifted software engineers to have flawed reasoning about the economy.
> it's just as possible for gifted software engineers to have flawed reasoning about the economy.
Are you sure your reasoning is flawless?
Free markets correspond with prosperity, in case after case.
A truly free market is also free of regulation and embraces predatory actions by monopolists. Think being paid in company scrip instead of dollars. Think a single food supply monopoly with patented seeds you can be prosecuted for propagating, and harmful additives in food because it's cheaper. Think better education inaccessible for those nincompoops who weren't born into wealth. Serves them right for choosing to be born poor, amirite?
Some amount of regulation is required if you want a just, healthy, society, with economic mobility.
People say they want 100% free markets but they don't really comprehend what that looks like.
> company scrip
Did you know that paychecks are private money? They aren't legal tender. RSU's are company scrip, too. Besides, nobody can make you take a job you don't want.
> patented seeds
Patents are a government invention, and I'm on record opposing them.
> harmful additives
Harming and/or defrauding customers is against the law and is actionable.
> better education inaccessible
Government run schools are pretty much bottom of the barrel.
Body weight is controllable, but is not the same thing as obesity, but scientific evidence does not suggest obesity is voluntary, but I'm not trying to talk about obesity. I was just merely using it as a proxy for societal health, because I hope you can agree that obesity is not healthy.
> The government is the primary institution that provides education
I thought there was a large section of free market libertarians that want to get rid of public schooling?
>I don't see how that is a result of economic freedom.
Again, i was using it as a proxy for safety, not economic freedom.
> The US was much more economically free in the 1800s than now
The middle class became the dominant class post-WWII. wtf are you talking about?
If I have one million people pay me $1000, I am creating value, but I not 'creating wealth' I would literally be consolidating the wealth of one million people into my bank account.
Owning desirable assets could be considered 'creating wealth' due to the price of those assets going up, but owning assets is not creating products and services that other people want.
I will go back to my original point, that economic freedom is not a panacea and does not solve for health, education, and safety, but rather creating things that people want to seperate them from their money. Health, education, and safety are all more effective when provided by the government.
> The middle class became the dominant class post-WWII.
I've heard that before, and it's simply not true. Pre-revolutionary colonial America had a thriving middle class.
Consider this. A couple of decades ago, a sunken Missisouppi river steamboat was found in the mud. It had foundered before the Civil War, I don't recall the date. And so it was dug out, and researchers went over its cargo.
They were shocked to find out what the cargo was.
It was everything needed for a general store. Pots, pans, jars, knives, forks, shoes, clothing, preserved meats and candies, tools, etc. Nothing in it was for rich people, it was all meant for the middle class. And it was packed to the gills with that cargo.
If you like, look at paintings and photographs of towns in the 1800s. Do you see a couple mansions, and a bunch of shacks? Nope. You see middle class homes, general stores, all signs of a prosperous middle class.
> all more effective when provided by the government
Government providing that has a pretty sorry history.
> due to the price of those assets going up
The price of the asset is a function of its ability to create value.
Do me a favor and point to an American history book that informed your point of view. But fair is fair, I submit:
https://www.amazon.com/ALASTAIR-COOKES-AMERICA-Alastair-Cook...
Read it and tell me that the US consisted of overlords and serfs. Yes, I know about the slave South, which was an overlord/serf economy.
All true but the kind of alignment problem you're talking about is only possible when the core of a society is directed at inspiring, bold, massive projects. There's not much on offer as an alternative to Muskism. It's worth remembering how insane everyone thought he was for claiming you could land the rocket upright and reuse it. And even more so, that you could catch one with chopsticks.
I don't know, I'm sure you'd say Europe is a far more healthy, educated, engaged and safe place (by typical metrics), but they are not building anything like this and probably never will be able to approach anything close to it. In fact they have technologically stagnated in basically every way and are completely reliant on China and the US for technology.
SpaceX is 85% of all mass to orbit for the entire planet, then it's China, and Europe is <5%.
The next people to set foot on the moon will likely be Americans, and they will be put there by SpaceX rockets.
They will try to dig us out of the hole they created by their previoua digging.
This is almost certainly false. The vast majority of government spending goes directly to people that need it or debt service. There is very little outright fraud as DOGE quickly learned. The only meaningful target for cuts is military. And the only solution to debt is higher taxes.
The only solution to debt is growth.
Any day now all those tax cuts are going to pay off and trickle down. Any day.
we need more nazis?
We need to tax all of "him" out of geopolitical relevance to fund a new New Deal, like we did after the first Gilded Age.
If it wasn't consolidated largely to a singular "him" we could be doing more of these, see: FDR's New Deal
By this method the money largely comes from the government and is captured into private interests, literally hollowing out the government tax base for corporate power
> economically meaningful for our nation
3,000 short term jobs doesn't put a dent in the thousands of jobs he has cut, not to mention the losses to our economy due to the tariffs, immigration policy, and deficit spending that he caused.
> We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon
I'm of the impression that you can't corrupt your way out of corruption.
Musk killed hundreds of thousands of impoverished people through the reckless and illegal wood-chippering of USAID and promotes and finances white supremacy and far-right politics around the world. This is who we should be celebrating? What a pathetic cult of personality this creep has built around him.
Personally, I can’t wait for the political pendulum to swing back hard so that he can be torn to shreds by the judicial system. (Where will he try to flee, I wonder? Back to South Africa? Will he try to pull a Carlos Ghosn? Man’s gotta dream…)
Musk is a marketing genius.
I don't think he's known for his marketing, he's known for his engineering
This sums up my and many others timeline of his understanding of engineering diciplines: https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958
That link is from 2022 presumably about the twitter purchase. People like the guy in the link thought Twitter would go offline hard after firing almost all of the company, instead Elon was right and there was so much fat to cut.
Yeah, twitter is doing great. /s
Posts like this is why HN is made fun of now in circles where real engineering happens. In reality you would not be able to follow what he's talking about because it would be well over your head.
Just watching him play POE should show you he's not the genius you think he is
Just proving my point here. Trying to win an argument because vidya.
At one point didn’t he say there was no sql in Twitter? I can follow that all the way to the dumpster that statement is.
In reality, you would not be able to follow what he's talking about because he's making stuff up and hoping your inability to understand him comes across as genius rather than bullshit.
I bet that Russian rocket engineer who spit on Musk is regretting it now.
He is (inaccurately) known for his engineering _because of_ his marketing.
you must not be an engineer.
As I said, he's a marketing genius.
Or maybe "was" is more accurate.
He doesn't build anything. Everything he's done has been acquisitions that he tries to astroturf as founding.
*financial engineering
See? Great marketing, he is not an engineer.
He was, until he took a chainsaw to things he didn’t understand.
I was a huge believer in Elon musk. I invested and made a lot of money in Tesla before Model S had even entered serial production. Now? Fuck you Elon, go Peter Beck…
Musk has done a huge amount to put us INTO this situation.
Which situation did Elon Musk put us in to? Can you elaborate? When did this situation start? What happened? What did he personally do that put us in the situation?
He personally ran the department that eviscerated funding for basic scientific research in the United States
You could have just posted the numbers to easily make/prove your point, but you didn't, and everyone knows why you didn't. Because the numbers don't align with what you're saying. But if enough people like you say it's true, I guess that makes it true, data be damned.
Here ya go https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.ht...
Something like 25% cut in new grants. 50% cuts to NSF... You could have just as easily found the data...
I did a word search on that article (it's impossible to read with its idiotic presentation), and "musk" is not mentioned.
Are you being serious? Are you actually not aware that Elon Musk ran the federal government department tasked with cancelling federal grants and firing government employees in 2025? How is it possible that you are not aware of this?
Present some evidence that he cut NSF spending.
A quick Google search will show you... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/26/nati...
You're just willfully ignorant
Asking for evidence is not "willfully ignorant". People making claims have the onus of backing them up. Anyhow, the link to the canceled projects is:
https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...
I looked at maybe a dozen at random, and only one seemed to have anything about scientific research. Of course, that is not a complete survey, but none of them looked important. I'm sure there are a few that are important.
Which one(s) do you think are most important?
I might be biased, but everything under the Division of Mathematical Sciences in the MPS directorate is important. Math is one of those weird fields that tends to touch everything else even if not directly, and it's impossible to know prima facie which areas of research will be useful downstream to the sciences and engineering.
I can go for that, as long as the research proposals are actually about math research.
The stuff in Airtable seems to be. The lion's share of what's there is research that has applications to, like, sensors and robotics and AI, even if the abstracts themselves don't state that, likely because the PIs behind those proposals aren't aware of those applications of their work.
(Just to illustrate how mathematicians can sometimes embody the archetype of Hans Guck-in-die-Luft: I had someone tell me once that there were no applications of ODEs or PDEs to the sciences or engineering.)
> Hans Guck-in-die-Luft
I have to upvote you just for that reference!
My mom tore out Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher, thinking it would be disturbing to my young mind.
Most of the important maths research is funded by the Department of War. NSF is a good chunk, I'd have to look it up, but I wouldn't be concerned about this at all. Math is important for the war planners, always has been always will be.
Are we looking at the same link? I scrolled through a bunch of them and I could not find a single one that was NOT related to scientific research. The UI is horrible so I can't link anything on that page, but here's what I see when I click that link:
https://i.imgur.com/LzwDuKl.png
(Edited to add, these are the abstracts, because I can't fit both in one screen /facepalm: https://i.imgur.com/yQKHViO.png)
Maybe there's a different filter or ordering being applied somewhere?
Maybe you and I have different views on what constitutes scientific research.
Funding DJT while he was running for office?
I'm not sure what situation we're in (can someone describe it please?), but did that situation only start the day Trump took office again after being elected by the American people?
Yes.
Predictability is extremely important for markets and planning and general welfare. He doesn’t have to randomly declare things on a Thursday that haven’t changed for decades and create anxiety among (you name it community or industry) just to stay in the headlines.
Donald Trump has destroyed predictability, as well as any semblance of functioning, predictable government. Trump is an extremely influential and powerful unilateral executive - in all the wrong ways.
Evidence you say? I guess tariff policy and a completely arbitrary war with Iran that roiled markets, just to name a couple from this year.
And Musks money and twitter takeover did a lot of work to convince Americans vote for Trump. Then Musk joined the administration and continued digging the hole
Ok.
The OP wrote:
> You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.
In the context of the US building big things, ramping up manufacturing, doing Space exploration, &c. and the person I replied to wrote:
> Musk has done a huge amount to put us INTO this situation
What situation did he put us in to in this context? Did he put us in to the situation where we are building bigger things now? Are you saying that there was a situation that we were put in to and that situation only started when Trump was elected and prior to that we were... what? Building big things and trying to restore manufacturing and now we're also doing that under Trump?
Someone here should be specific about what they're talking about instead of just "Musk bad Trump bad". Yea they're both morons or whatever but what exactly are we supposedly criticizing here? Just that Trump got elected? Ok that's a boring conversation let's switch back to talking about manufacturing and building big projects in America.
It'd be nice if his companies paid the tax they owe.
https://itep.org/elon-musk-spacex-tax-breaks-doge/
I'll bite. Things we had in December 2024 that we no longer have today, all of which contribute to the success or failure of major initiatives:
- 2.9% inflation - Billions of dollars of grants for state-run energy projects - NATCAST - Healthy & stable funding for the sciences - Competent leaders at the federal and military levels to oversee large complex projects - Healthy partnerships with allies
Specific actions that have been taken by Trump (backed by Musk) that caused us to lose the above:
- Starting an unnecessary war with Iran - Cancelling grants for energy projects specifically in blue states - Imposing nonsensical tariffs on trade partners - Starting a full-blown trade war with Canada - Alienating other allies, ex. starting a middle-east conflict without any alliances (excl. Israel) - Specifically closing NATCAST because "illegal" - Gutting of science funding by DOGE & others - Removal of competent leaders & prioritization of loyalty over competence when choosing staff
I have a hard time taking anyone seriously when they bring up anything about Trump having a positive impact on manufacturing in America. For 4+ years he's been lying to the American public about how tariffs work and claiming that US consumers paying more taxes to the US gov't in the form of tariffs is going to 'return' manufacturing to the US. We have almost half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the US - explain to me again why this is a capacity problem?
There's nothing to really bite on here - the OP said Elon Musk put us "in this situation" - I'm still looking for a definition or answer on what exactly this situation is. Is it a situation in which Trump is simply president? OK but Trump himself nor Musk are responsible for the previous decades of manufacturing capability destruction in the US, as an example.
If it's just complaining about Trump/Musk then yea sure let's complain about them in a different topic, but the OP was talking about Musk building big things and he undeniably has (or his companies have, rather).
What are you talking about?
Please read the thread for context.
fun fact, voters cause election consensus, not spending
not spending ensures no voters know who you are, but the most spending doesn't result in the most votes
funny prisoner's dilemma for partisans, well, more amusing if you sell ad space
> voters cause election consensus, not spending
This is potentially one of the most out of touch comments I've seen here in a while, and that's saying something.
that view doesn’t make it false
You are claiming (or pretending) that spend (ie, marketing spend) isn't one of, if not _the_, biggest factors in which of a set of options ends up being the winner?
In this case you don't get to try the options first. You made a decision based on what you've seen and heard.
And you think the advertising budget isn't the key thing?
As I wrote
“not spending ensures no voters know who you are, but the most spending doesn't result in the most votes”
Did your eyes glaze over after the first line, it’s such a short comment
The one with the intentionally broken federal government
One such example - he's using his massive wealth and influence to support fascist political movements that promise mass deportation and "remigration", and even supporting these policies explicitly himself.
In the US, his political beneficiaries have managed to "achieve" net negative migration to the US for the first time in 50 years, and the first decline in overall population in US history.
If this becomes the new trend (and if Musk gets his political desires fulfilled, it might), the hole is getting much, much deeper while our capacity to climb out is being severely impaired.
And oh yea, he killed hundreds of thousands of kids, mostly under 5.
>We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible.
Can you explain why you think the US needs more corrupt, authoritarian Nazi nepo babies and not less?
I'm honestly asking because I'm absolutely flabbergasted that people still think he's a force for good.
Discounting challenges to your beliefs by burying your head in the sand is certainly a choice.
There is a reason Musk is so rich. He got most of his funding from taxpayers:
https://www.moneytalksnews.com/slideshows/billion-and-counti...
It is not him, SpaceX is a government funded project yet he keeps all the money. You should be outraged.
There's a lot to criticize, but this argument seems extremely misleading to me. The government wants to put things into space. SpaceX says "this is how much we're willing to take to do so" and bids on the government contract to do so. Notably, this is drastically cheaper launch pricing than the Space Shuttle and whatever other venues NASA had. These weren't R&D grants which are more arguable.
Few Americans have done more than musk to destroy state capacity and to enable corruption on a massive scale, all while enriching himself to an unprecedented degree. That's great for him and his cronies that he has gotten so wealthy doing it, but he's been a huge net-negative to most humans.
I get that rockets are cool and a lot of people in the tech bubble think that starlink is the greatest thing ever, but most people don't care about that nearly as much as they care about seeing their children die from preventable diseases he cut the funding for or getting violently ill because he drove thousands of food inspectors and researchers out of a job.
Handling the enormous federal debt that he continues to play a part in worsening is going to very painful in the long run.
so insanely out of touch. go chat with any AI.
You don’t need AI to get psychosis!
So where is the guy who is respectful to the government and compliant with regulations that is out there building millions of EVs, rockets, and massive satellite constellations? If he existed I could respect your argument. But in reality the only guy who seems to be able to build a modern mass manufacturing company in the US is the trillionaire who runs roughshod over all forms of government oversight that gets in his way. That should tell you something about where the problem lies here.
Elon Musk isn't the problem, he is the symptom. The problem is that it is basically required to be ruthless and corrupt to get anything done in this country at the scale, price, and timeline needed to be commercially viable. The solution is less regulation and bureaucracy, not more.
he's in china working on trains and renewable energy
rockets and wifi satellites are only solving problems because corporations have sucked public infrastructure dry for generations
ah yes the "wifi" satellites
I think the root of the problem is “vetocracy.” We’ve created a system where small minorities can hold everything up, sometimes for ideological reasons and sometimes for financial reasons. The classic case of the latter is homeowners opposing all home construction to raise their property values, but it happens in other areas too.
Vetocracy isn’t democracy. It’s a tiny minority having veto power.
So yes the only person who succeeds in such a system is a human battering ram who can just bash their way through it by being a manic asshole with insane force of will.
There should be tons of Elon Musks, including nicer ones, but nice people get vetoed.
Lol why is this downvoted? There is no dispute that he spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Trump and seat himself in government while his companies are financially dependent on government programs and contracts. This is an obvious conflict of interest, and also completely on par with all of the other corruption we're seeing from this administration.
Exactly. I actually laughed out loud at OP's comment. Elon Musk has never done anything to benefit the broader "us." The idea that "we" need people like Musk to "dig us out of this situation" --a situation that rich men like Musk put us into in the first place-- is absolutely ridiculous.
Billionaires don't "dig" anything except the foundations for things that are going to make them even more money.
Golden Dome might be "economically meaningful" but it will also lead to WWIII so, no thank you.
No it won't. Separately other countries don't get to dictate our internal policies or whether we decide to build any sort of missile defense system. If we're going to be nuked over it, then oh well they'll get nuked too. Never can we live as hostages to wanna-be dictators and tyrants (Xi Jingping, Vladimir Putin, IRGC, &c.) and if they want to blow the whole world up then so be it but acquiescing to their bullying is simply not an option. If you think it's an option, then we should issue our own nuclear threats and take them hostage instead.
Is your cognitive dissonance that strong that you don't see that if all major countries follow that line of thought all have to have their own golden domes and invite WW3?
I don’t think that’s an appropriate use of the term ‘cognitive dissonance’, but suffice to say, no, if the US develops the Golden Dome as currently described there is no danger of all major countries also developing the same technology and then starting World War III.
How does everyone having golden dome invite WWIII? We can't shoot missiles at them, so therefore let's go start a war with them? What sense does that make?
And if we do, how are we going to fight them? By shooting missiles at them?
I wish he kept a lower profile. His public behavior risks overshadowing the work SpaceX is doing, work that could benefit humanity in ways we can’t yet fully anticipate. I wish we had more Elons pushing us toward a "future that looks like the future," as he said.
If we just don't talk about the blatant racism, the nazi salute, or that rampage about removing brown people from jobs they didn't deserve, it might stop being such a huge problem. Sure buddy.
But its also hard not to be. I'm not a fan of Musk and it doesn't even have to do with Musk himself as its a common theme I see among a lot of the big tech companies or really any company doing a big project in my neck of the woods. An hour north east of me, there has been big on going data center projects for 10+ years. Sounds good right? I got a lot of family and friends in the trades. But I can almost set my watch to it. When work ramps up, its always good pay and 15 years of guaranteed work until suddenly its not. 8 months go by, suddenly everything is paused and all those contractors are out of work for a year and a half until things start up again. Then its rinse and repeat.
"I almost sold a car today, but if I did, sure it would have been some income, but who knows when the next time I would sell another car would be? Why bother? It's rinse and repeat"
Heck. Yeah. I'm with you. This is GOOD.
Social media is unhealthy. You know what else is unhealthy? Hacker News' constant bashing of every. single. thing. ever.
I love that people see a website about one of musk’s ideas and go “wow this is real and happening” in the year of our lord 2026
I sit in my car and I push the lever and it drives from my house to my partner’s house ten miles away without me touching the control inputs once.
It seems things are getting done.
These comments are so strange, because you’re demonstrating how far your head is in the sand, willfully.
Of course Musk talks big. He is almost always late. Lots of things have never happened, or have not yet worked (but they’re still trying)
At the same time he has monumental successes that nobody, ever, has achieved. Worlds safest car (multiple times) worlds highest selling car (model y), car of the year, massive factories building at a speed and quality that made Toyotas CEO say they’re in trouble and have a lot to improve.
The whole supercharger network that smashes every other one.
World’s first reusable rocket, done it 300 times now. Only two others have done it once. By far, by far more launches than every country and company in the world put together. Starship coming along.
To say that he never does anything is a very, very strange set of blinders to view the world through
>At the same time he has monumental successes that nobody, ever, has achieved.
"Nobody ever" doesn't really feel accurate here.
>Worlds safest car (multiple times)...
According to which body? Tesla's interpretation of NHTSA data? Some other organization? Did other cars prior to Tesla's inception obtain this title "multiple times"?
>... worlds highest selling car (model y)...
In 2023, the Y peaked at ~1.22 million. In 1923, the Model T sold ~2.09 million.
>... car of the year...
Numerous bodies label things "car of the year", and many cars were named that before and after Teslas were produced.
> ”Nobody ever" doesn't really feel accurate here
Please provide a list of all the companies that have reused a first stage booster many times.
And all the companies that have launched more to orbit in a year than everyone else combined.
> According to which body? Tesla's interpretation of NHTSA data? Some other organization? Did other cars prior to Tesla's inception obtain this title "multiple times"?
August 2013 (Model S): Tesla announced that the Model S achieved a 5.4-star rating from the NHTSA, noting it was the highest score ever recorded at the time.
February 2017 (Model X): The NHTSA gave the Model X a 5-star rating in every category, making it the first SUV with the lowest probability of injury.
August 2018 (Model 3): Tesla published data showing the Model 3 had the lowest probability of injury of any car tested by the NHTSA.
September 2022 (Model Y): The Model Y earned record-breaking safety scores during European testing, achieving the highest overall safety score recorded by Euro NCAP at that time.
December 2024 / 2025 (Model Y & Model 3): The IIHS awarded the Model Y a Top Safety Pick+ designation, while Euro NCAP named both the Model 3 and Model Y as "Best-in-Class" safety winners.
January 2026 (Global NCAP Wins): Euro NCAP and ANCAP crowned the Model 3 as the safest Large Family Car and the Model Y as the safest Small SUV under updated protocols.
> * In 2023, the Y peaked at ~1.22 million. In 1923, the Model T sold ~2.09 million.*
Safe to say the model T had a lot less competition in 1923 than the Y does now. Clearly it’s a bigger achievement now.
> Numerous bodies label things "car of the year", and many cars were named that before and after Teslas were produced.
Tesla were the first electric car to win coty and be highly praised as having a chance to make EVs mainstream. I don’t know how old you are and if you remember, the Model S was nothing like we had seen before (I’m an automotive journalist, FWIW)
Never owned a Tesla.
No horse in the race.
https://elonmusk.today/
> you’re demonstrating how far your head is in the sand
Interesting. Perhaps ironic?
If only society cared about genuinely good people like they seem to care about Musk. It's puzzling.
I want to be clear: I don’t care about Musk as a person. I care about facts. I care about achievements.
Just the same as saying Israel is committing genocide is not antisemitism, saying Musk has achieved incredible things is not caring about or supporting him.
Both cases are simply stating facts without any judgement or show of support/not support.
>I care about facts.
>Both cases are simply stating facts...
Sure, unless (as I pointed out in my other response) we're playing fast and loose with what actually constitutes "facts".
> I don’t care about Musk as a person.
How convenient. You have to ignore him on a personal level to be a supporter like you are. Because you know he's a repulsive individual on every level. And if you didn't qualify your support for him you'd debase yourself.
It is factually true that Elon Musk has a reputation for saying things will happen that do not end up happening. Picking out some things that you like about him and posting them while excluding the dozens of publicly documented examples of him either lying or (very charitably) being so “hopeful” that he’s disconnected from reality is indistinguishable from volunteering support.
If your Tesla (made by a company he took private at $420/share) makes you passive income as a robotaxi while you sleep, which you spend paying off the loan you took out in 2020 for the ticket to Mars that you bought to avoid covid which ended up being pointless because nobody got it past April then I’d understand being confused about his reputation. If not, you kind of just posted a roundabout way of saying that you don’t care or notice when he makes stuff up.
As both you and I said, Elon talks big and has failed to deliver on a ton of things
That does not mean he has achieved nothing incredible.
If John Carmack or Tim Cook or Henry Ford said they were going to make cheap, reliable fusion reactors in every home but never did, they would still be the legends they are for the things they did do successfully. The things they didn’t do don’t change what they did.
The two are unrelated, infact.
Of all of Musk's ventures, SpaceX seems to actually do things and not just say they do things.
Man if this actually starts to happen it's a good time to be a welder, concrete worker, or any general contractor or tradesman in Louisiana. Coastal Louisiana is some of the poorest areas in the US even more so than the valley in Texas where Starbase Texas is located. Probably 10-20 years worth of solid work building out that site.
Hmmm is it though? Quite a few articles like https://futurism.com/future-society/elon-musk-stiffing-contr... make me think they better ask to be paid upfront.
Interesting article but not too thorough. Here is more about that contractor:
https://www.hagerty.com/media/great-reads/how-darryl-cuttell...
Hmmm. Aquire all these properties under the guise of reviving things for racing and oopsie it failed what ever shall we do with all these properties now? Oh yeah do what we do best – build data centers.
Why would a contractor continue working for two years racking up a $136M dollar bill?
Because they believe the lies from Musk?
Starbase, TX
Giga Texas
Giga Nevada
Terrafab
etc
There's plenty of examples of this company building these types of projects and following through.
Why do you think this one would be any different?
We are literally talking about a case where they aren’t paying contractors they work with
These types of allegations are extremely common with basically every type of construction project, especially when contractors know the client has deep pockets. None of this has been adjudicated by a court. Plus this story is written by someone with bluesky link in their bio by a publication that has an obvious bias:
>Elon Musk Just Said Something About AI That’s Literally Incomprehensible >Sure, man.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/elon-musk-ai-in...
Because they got paid 1.4 billion for work before SpaceX accused them of fraud, put a hold on future payments, and sued them
because they know the company signing the contract can pay it
And SpaceX is suing that firm for 500-800 million for fraud and unauthorized labor markup.
It's so interesting to me that the whole "futurism" concept got co-opted into some sort of political propaganda machine. All the articles are negative hit pieces, they're all reductive, they're almost all political in nature. I used to go on the futurism subreddit years ago and it's all the same there. You'd think "futurism" would be about .. promoting new technology, ushering in the future, you know .. futurism. Not just another political propaganda outlet.
Futurism is a focus on the future. The future may be good or bad. Your desire to focus only on the upsides (for you) and not want to hear about the consequences, externalities, or dangers is one of the most "political" positions a technologist can have.
Do you hate reading most science fiction? Because the ratio of dystopic to utopic scifi is pretty unbalanced.
Yeah, I hate modern science fiction. It's almost all terrible. Sci-fi written in the time of actual ongoing world wars and the Cold War's constant threat of instant nuclear annihilation was far more optimistic, and far more imaginative.
If you don't mind the shameless plug, you may want to check my optimistic sci-fi visual novel: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
It's on sale now :).
Read more solarpunk then?
That is a modern phenomena though. Classic scifi was optimistic and utopian. But today even Star Trek has to be bleak/gritty/depressing.
Classic sci-fi was far from universally optimistic, it had more optimistic pieces than we do today but I'd still say on the whole it was more dystopia than utopia. Even for its own time, the original Star Trek was considered uniquely optimistic, though a large part of that is that its just much easier to write a good story where the setting itself provides the necessary challenges for a story to work, rather than an optimistic setting which rules out a lot of the usual challenges. Even Star Trek struggled, a good chunk of its stories are about encountering a race or civilisation without that utopia, turns out telling a good story without any conflict is pretty tough, especially a long running one.
But it does more generally reflect how society views technology as a whole too. People are generally a lot more pessimistic about new tech now, myself included, we've seen time and time again how its used to control or squeeze us. There actually was a Star Trek episode, "The Game" (season 5, episode 6) about an addicting device you could compare to smartphones (though the device in Star Trek doesn't spy on you to sell your every move to advertisers, missed a trick there), and that certainly wasn't supposed to be an optimistic look at technology, so you can see why things have gone the way they have.
> Classic scifi was optimistic and utopian
Yeah for sure, science fiction used to be optimistic and utopian, like Planet of the Apes, Brave New World, Frankenstein, 1984, Earth Abides, The Martian Chronicles, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and Island of Dr Moreau, We, Farenheit 451 ...
Great to see Island of Dr Moreau mentioned, people often forget about that but its one of my favourite books
Forgot about We, I love that book
You mean like Dune, the Neuromancer, Bladerunner, the Time Machine?
I've wondered about that.
Recently I have read fiction where someone discovers a spaceship/artifact/portal/alien/mcguffin/etc and then they... get the mcguffin, get more stuff, get the girl, win. The plot is just a straight line.
they're boring.
Although not a straight line, any superhero movie. they're predictable and therefore, boring.
So I found the stuff that used to fill me with wonder, I shy away from. I don't want to watch another marvel hero.
I kind of wonder if non-utopia scifi, with reality and struggles and character development... is that the good stuff? doesn't have to all be dark forest or enshittification++ though.
I liked district 9 for instance.
You could just say “no” - it would save a lot of space, be about as polite, and way less annoying.
Sometimes people want to talk about science stuff without talking about human fallout and political implications. It’s perfectly fine to want an occasional break from those types of discussions.
Talking about "science stuff" without even mentioning the political and human implications is pointlessly incomplete. It's like trying to talk about a programming language without mentioning variables.
Everything is human and everything is political. To pretend that it is not is, in itself, a political stance.
Let's take the two pieces you put out there and just look at logical conclusions., because it's kinda hilarious to imagine you actually hold this actually-insane position.
1. Everything is political
2. Talking about something without mentioning political and human implications is "pointlessly incomplete"
Topic: "Anyone wanna go swimming?"
Normal people: "Sure."
You, apparently: "Are you aware of how water is unequally distributed throughout the world? How can we possibly discuss swimming if we aren't willing to discuss the political fallout? This is pointlessly incomplete."
Next panel, you're just researching local water table rights while everyone else is swimming and having fun
Nice strawman.
Nope, just showing how ridiculous it is to hold the position that everything is political. It's okay to just talk about things casually, dude. Chill out, it'll serve you well.
If your position isn't that everything is political, don't say it is. If it is your position, this is perfectly in line with what you stated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_Futurism
It's always been political
Mussolini and other Italian inventors-of-Fascism figures were closely allied with the Futurism movement and Marinetti.
https://www.booksontrial.com/mussolini-and-marinetti-a-timel...
That’s Italian futurism, which was a specific movement. I think the term was being used more broadly here.
Go find some Soviet space art, or mid century American “space age” stuff, or less dark forms of cyberpunk / cyber culture from the 80s and 90s. None of that is fascist yet all of it is popularly called “futurism.” I’ve even seen the term associated with solarpunk.
As popularly used it means more or less the idea of trying to use human intellect to build or create something fundamentally new, or roughly that. It’s not a precise term more of a vibe.
Mid century American and Soviet space art had transparent political purpose, as does solarpunk. Futurism is rarely if ever just "it's the future, and that's neat!". It comes with the inherently political baggage of "We got from where we are to the glorious future, by way of (ideology)". Star Trek is a great example of this.
That could be said about everything including things usually not associated with futurism like romanticism. Everything carries at least a little political baggage.
I was responding to what seemed like the implication that futurism was fascist.
Any particular issue you have with the content of the article?
That’s just a microcosm of everything. The culture war ate the entire public discourse to the exclusion of practical concerns and even coherent ideas. It’s all vibes and tribalism and bashing the other tribes, while the tribes themselves become increasingly incoherent in terms of what (if anything) they really mean or stand for.
I just turned it all off, though it makes me fear for the future. Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.
Yeah you're right. Sci-fi has never included social commentary. Purely a modern "culture war" phenomenon...
> Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.
Strongly agree, there is hardly any intelligent discussions with diverging opinions left anymore. People are too deep into their own propaganda, agenda, and echo chambers. Peak bullshit is near.
Okay but Musk himself deliberately and continuously uses his companies and wealth to participate in the culture war so it's no surprise it comes up when his companies do.
He could switch off and stick to building rockets and electric cars. It's very easy (notionally) to just not post on Twitter.
Yes he does, and he’s also a social media addict. With X the alcoholic bought the bar.
>they're all reductive
What is reductive in the richest man on Earth not paying his dues on time? What nuance, what depth do you think is needed here?
While workers are rarely paid up front, two week pay interval is pretty common
Contractors are commonly net30/net60/net90 or paid on completion and inspection of work done. This isn't a union job with biweekly paychecks.
You think SpaceX is shopping out their infrastructure to individual contractors?
did we read the same article? The link above says nothing about pay period but does list hundreds of millions unpaid.
hundreds of millions unpaid and zero investigative journalism to try to get at the truth, besides "liens filed therefore Elon Musk is a cheapskate".
So you think multiple contractors in multiple states are just filing liens for fun?
Anything at scale will have payment disputes. Did the work happen, was it for contract, did it run over? These types of questions are extremely common
Right so the article says they aren’t paying but should be. Do you have evidence to suggest otherwise?
"Quite a few" while you're the woman from if Google Was A Guy with literally one result against an avalanche.
SpaceX makes plumbers millionaires. It's the employer of dreams
Its well known X did not pay their huge AWS bill. I would ask for cash first...
I live around a lot of those people in SW Ohio who find themselves traveling to states like Louisiana for welding, electrical and general contracting work because the expertise isnt there. I have to imagine much of the same will happen and if anything they might reap rewards following construction. Regardless I would assume little to no relevant expertise exists there at the moment.
One thing about construction trades is that they will hire apprentices. Someone needs to do the grunt work, and they learn on the job (or in class if they are union) and eventually become productive or wash out.
A lot of good, hard working people in that area that would love to have these jobs open up.
somewhat topical video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3dSjY4j7Ak
tl;dw -- louisiana has a ton of natural resources and wonderful harbors, but has allowed corporations to get away with almost anything without paying their fair share of taxes, cleaning up their waste, or generally being held accountable. And likely related, there is a long history of rampant corruption in the area. With sea levels rising and cancerous pollution filling densely populated areas, life in Louisiana has generally become very difficult :(
I haven't had time to watch the video but my understanding was a lot of the Louisiana coast have big problems with rising sea levels and much of it in the process of falling underwater. Perhaps it's relatively trivial to reinforce the coast for the forseeable I don't know.
The plans for the site involve extracting significant amounts of natural gas to make methane to burn for the rocket fuel. If they hit the launch levels they suggest (thousands of launches per year), this is not a small amount of greenhouse gases they'll be emitting which of course helps accelerate melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels, which could threaten the very site they've built it on.
They're also the folks working on the largest co2 -> methane converters in the world. Because that's how they'll need to make fuel on Mars, and no one else on earth wants to fund an expensive technology to replace an inexpensive gas pumped from the ground. By definition, these reactors will have to be capable of producing enough fuel for a rocket in order to be fit for purpose. That opens the door for carbon neutral operation. It's tough to imagine a greener rocket than a fully reusable one that's carbon neutral running on methane. Sure beats spewing hypergolics or solid rocket fuels.
Reminds me of Africa in terms of resource exploitation and lack of re-investment.
The book “Strangers in Their Own Land” covers similar ground.
> but has allowed corporations to get away with almost anything without paying their fair share of taxes
No doubt one of the more compelling reasons for SpaceX to do it there (along with their given reasoning).
What are the chances they'll employ cheap labor they can just use as election fodder for stealing hard-working american jobs?
Either that or pay decent wages for American workers that'll drive up construction prices and worsen the inflation which is already crazy due to these criminal tariffs.
So no matter what they do, you blame them? If they pay not enough, they are bad, if they pay enough, they are also bad. Ok.
They put themselves in that situation, the US admin, not me. I'm just commenting. Or is any of what I said wrong? I mean there's something called ITAR that requires American workers, but that doesn't mean the impact on inflation isn't real
ITAR requires them to employ US citizens.
ITAR proves it’s possible to have immigration enforcement.
Inflation is caused by deficit money creation. It is not caused by taxes, tariffs, corporate greed, union greed, oligarchs, or anything else.
That's a very narrow view of inflation. If you increase wages, there's more demand for goods, more demand means higher prices which means higher inflation. Same with tariffs, they are paid when importing goods, which is passed onto the consumer, resulting in higher prices and thus inflation.
> That's a very narrow view of inflation.
It's the only correct one. For proof, consider the inflation that happened when Spain looted gold from S. America, then during the California Gold Rush, then the Yukon Gold Rush.
All driven by an increase in the supply of money.
And where did that money to increase wages come from?
That’s a very, very narrow definition of inflation
If the figures in this announcement hold up, they're gonna spend like $20k per resident of LA. That's insane.
Lol. I can't imaging the figures from a Musk venture not holding up.
Many said that about Starlink too. Impossible to send so many rockets up. Till it isn't.
Could you find a source of someone saying this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W676Kk9LSYw
Are "3,000 new jobs" enough to make a dent though?
it doesn't fix everything wrong in the state but it's > 0. There's a lot of additional economic activity that comes with the construction too. Restaurants get busier, Walmart gets busier, lots of auto repair/servicing will be needed etc. Som e people will move for construction and end up staying there. It can be a shock to the local communities though but i think the positives still outweigh the negatives.
The biggest issue is these kinds of construction jobs are temporary. It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over. Starbase will require more people on site at least.
The construction is temporary but what are the economic impacts of having a fully operational spaceport that launches 20,000% more tonnage to orbit than the Florida Space Coast?
Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.
One would think the same thing about having some of the biggest chemical manufacturing and refining industries around and yet the people of Louisiana are some of the poorest in the US.
Tons of money flowing through the state. Just to a select few people who own the plants for the most part, not for the people working there day to day. I don't see why one would think that would change.
You mean the negative economic impacts?
yeah but that site is huge, that's a multi-decade construction project.
aren't literally all construction jobs temporary? once something is finished you usually stop construction.
>It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over.
The issue with Datacentres is that you cant model the advantage of lower colo costs on jobs in the area.
The problem is that some people dont want to permit anything unless they can measure the benefits, when the market doesnt always work like that.
The whole "temporary jobs" line is completely irrelevant nonsense. Sure, it's correct, but who cares? The alternative is zero. It's not like there is only a limited amount of undeveloped land and a bunch of people bidding for it. And of course those jobs don't stick around after construction is over. They're construction workers. They move on to the the next construction job.
Sounds like "legal language" threshold for whatever reason? The Terafab announcement used the same phrase:
>The initial phase of Terafab is estimated to require approximately $16.8 billion in capital investments from SpaceX and Tesla, with potential future expansion phases bringing total investment much higher. This facility will employ at least 3,000 people, many of whom will be from Grimes and nearby Brazos County — continuing the trend of our other Texas sites where between 60% and 80% of new hires are local residents.
https://www.spacex.com/updates#terafab
That Starbase concept (not that the numbers are realistic by any means) is orders of magnitude more ambitious than what SpaceX does today with 22k employees.
> many of whom will be from Grimes
That required a double take
Unless of course Musk decides to use the opportunity to advertise Optimus, be it with actually AI able to do it or teleoperator do it.
I'm skeptical that Optimus can be productive at anything other than picking up boxes, moving them around, then stacking them.
Won’t stop him from advertising them
Nope, it won't. Won't stop the government from advertising the failed California high speed rail, either. But I think Musk is more likely to deliver on Optimus.
Optimus would have to work well enough in the near future for that not gonna happen
Optimus ins’t gonna be a master welder, electrician, HVAC technician, general contractor anytime soon.
Debatable. Optimus will be programmed by watching thousands of YouTube videos and by indexing the entire NEC. It is entirely possible that a single Optimus can be a master welder, electrician, and HVAC technician. What Optimus can't do is take responsibility for the completion of the work as being done to code. Nor is it clear how much Optimus will cost to buy or operate.
Underestimating humanoid capabilities is a mistake; the real challenge will be the economics and the flow of responsibility. But imagine a future where every structure built has a pov video documenting its construction. I don't like the implication for the trades any more than I like the implication of Claude for putting me out of work either.
Latest LLMs that have good visual understanding (Gemini and GPT) are able to tell if construction work is up to code. You can give it a picture of electrical wiring, plumbing, framing and it will tell you if it's up to code with very good accuracy.
These guys have been popping up on my instagram bragging about how much money they're making building DCs and any argument they get between their "Im making $350k/week, what're you getting, lib?!" is defended with "Well all your instagram comments are stored in datacenters, and you didn't cry then!"
They have no idea what they're actually building, of course. I just love the comparison of a webhost/telco pop to Manhattan sized gigadcs that require nuclear power plants or blasting gas furnaces.
Incremental domestic capital investment, good.
The level of cynicism, shit-talking, and schadenfreude wish-casting in response to this is crazy. Start cheering on successes. Resist the deconstructionist mindset.
>Start cheering on successes.
Sure, when success stops being the environmental destruction of every area he sets up shop in for SpaceX launches.
Yeah that’s just a fig leaf. I bet you can’t even name all the other places that have launch sites.
Is it realistic to demand a spaceport with no environmental impact from anyone, SpaceX or not?
Current launch technology inevitably produces a lot of heat and noise and we don't have any rocket model that wouldn't at least rarely fail (and explode).
That said, extant Cape Canaveral does not seem to be lifeless. Lots of birds. IDK how the precise species composition has changed since 1960, but nature as a whole is a lot more resilient than people seem to think.
The doomerism has two primary sources:
1) Political - The ideology/party spreading the doomerism promotes that they're the ones that can "fix it", if only you vote for them.
2) Adversarial countries, primarily China - Using the internet to convince members of western civilization to hate their civilization, hate their economic system, hate their history, hate their compatriots, adopt a no motivation defeatist attitude, etc., etc., and they can get our population to destroy itself from within without having to go to war with us.
Reject the doomerism, reject the negativity. Build. Invent. Create. Do your part to contribute to your civilization, to contribute to humanity, to move us forwards.
The people who build rockets and computers and the Internet are the good guys of history. We should do more of that. That statement shouldn’t have a political valence—people who subscribe to that idea can argue whether taxes should be higher or lower. But if you reject that concept you’re rejecting civilization itself.
It has a political valence when one party is campaigning on punishing and stopping them from building. "Should" is a meaningless word unless I have agency to change that, and I don't.
> The people who build rockets and computers and the Internet are the good guys of history
Does no one read history anymore?
IBM and the Holocaust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
The V-2 rocket
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket
"The V-2 rocket (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, lit. 'Vengeance Weapon 2'), with the development name Aggregat-4 (A4), was the world's first practical, modern ballistic missile and suborbital launch vehicle.[4] The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Nazi Germany as a "vengeance weapon" and assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings of German cities."
Nazi's are the good guys only when they work for the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
3) Elon Musk has fascist leanings and many people don't want to live in a world where such a person has ever increasing wealth, influence and power. Especially since he has no qualms about using that same wealth and influence to subvert and distort elections, both domestic and foreign.
> Elon Musk has fascist leanings
Fascists aren't known for cutting government spending.
Neither is Elon Musk...
Musk has been simultaneously accused of cutting spending and failing to cut spending.
They're pretty well known for lawlessly purging bureaucracies of experienced, civil servants loyal to the rule of law, to make way for cronies and regime loyalists.
They're pretty well known for scapegoating and persecuting immigrants and minorities and "enemies within" - and engaging in political projects to imprison and/or eject them from the nation.
Musk didn't cut government spending. Legally, only congress can do that. They increased spending. 10s of billions of that spending has gone to towards a mass build out of prison camps where many people, citizens included, are being held in horrid conditions indefinitely without due process and without being charged with any crime. This seems to be a project that Musk supports.
Go Solar City! Wait...
Elon Musk is mostly a bad person. I do not want mostly bad people to succeed. Why is that hard to understand? You either do no think he is a bad person, or ignore the fact he is.
I'm capable of understanding people are multidimensional and capable of both good and bad things. it's possible think someone is a bad person while understanding that not literally everything they do is evil. this project being successful will improve the lives of thousands of others would you rather the project fail and have things stay the same?
Is it a good time though? - Their Texas suppliers have been chasing payment and Greg Abbott rolled over and let Elon get their property without payment. Not the only Tesla/SpaceX vendor not being paid either. https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/cars/tesla/tesla-cybertruc...
That…is the opposite of the facts reported in that story you linked.
Articles are mostly a prompt for people
So this is official after months of speculation. Local realtors called this back in May https://x.com/SERobinsonJr/status/2051440979878559829 , and Ars Technica covered these rumors earlier this month https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/spacex-is-set-to-acqui... .
The Louisiana location has two major benefits:
Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO) Access: Launches into SSO have a launch angle of ~98° relative to the equator (i.e. south), and launching from Louisiana gives a direct launch corridor over the Gulf of America without crossing major cities.
SpaceX plans to launch millions of datacenter satellites in SSO, so this is the perfect launch site for their use case. SSO launches from their existing launch sites (Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral) would overfly land.
Existing Methane pipelines: They are next to existing Gulf Coast natural gas/LNG infra, making bulk liquid methane delivery significantly easier. Currently for Starbase, there are no pipelines and methane is shipped in via truck. Delivering the ~1,000 metric tons of methane required for a single Starship launch requires 50-60 tanker truck deliveries.
I think you mean the Gulf of Mexico.
It's poor form to let a crybaby bully have his way.
I'm not a fan of the guy myself but is this really the way we want to debate things here?
There's no debate. There never was. There is only concession to the diktat or resistance.
Debate used to be the staunchest form of resistance. This last decade, racing to call the opposition a crybaby and declare it activism seems to be more in vogue.
Gulf of America ftfy
> Gulf of America
Do people actually use that name when Trump can't force them to on pain of job loss? I'm pretty sure nobody outside the US does, at the very least.
Not that I've experienced elsewhere - it took me a moment to realize what the OP was referring to.
Nope, nobody I know has ever called it that. Don's latest spat has him wanting to change Lake Ontario to Lake of America. I did get a good laugh out of that because of how petty it is.
And for good reason. It’s an insult to the rest of the world.
I dunno, a lot of folks in leadership in the valley and tech in general don’t have, or present a problem with most, if not all of the changes.
Also the benefit of marginal environmental regulations...
Don’t forget the corruption and low income locals who won’t be able to provide any meaningful pushback
Pushback? Anyone wishes they lived there now. SpaceX bought out stragglers off Boca Chica for multiple times the value of their homes
Yes, it’s much easier to buy people off and legally “persuade” them out of their homes when the local economy is depressed and they can’t afford a lawyer.
people getting paid an order of magnitude more money for their property and yet people like you will find a reason to complain. Where is this coming from? Some anti-capitalist, degrowth thing? Genuinely curious
Typical "everything is bad" response. This is going to employ thousands of blue collar workers for years. Reasonable environmental protections will be in place. It's not going to become some barren toxic waste zone.
This is Chinese-level industrial planning. Amazing.
I wonder if anyone read the copy on this page or if it mostly came out of an LLM.
The "Restoring the shoreline" and Rebuilding the marshlands" paragraphs below the images are almost exactly the same. The first sentence is exactly the same.
Maybe, but there's some very specific legal language that cpra and the state requires everyone use in referring to some of these issues, and at least part of the land SpaceX is acquiring is involved in coastal restoration lawsuits or deep water horizon settlements or both.
As an engineer working on cpra projects in the past, I've wanted to reword a variety things but was forced to use their legal language.
It's mostly a good thing as it keeps things properly defined in a political context that are meant to have specific technical meanings (like marsh, beach, rebuild vs restore).
I did briefly consider something along those lines, but shoreline and marshlands are materially different, plus they've already changed the text.
For me that makes it more likely to be human-generated. Seems like a "rushing person juggling revs and copy-pasting" mistake.
FWIW, the writing style and tone match pre-LLM SpaceX writing. Of course you can prompt an LLM to mimic style, but somehow the regression-to-average blandness shines through. That can be hard to distinguish from bog standard corporate speak though.
Maybe the site developer saw your comment. They're different now.
Good thing the internet never forgets: https://web.archive.org/web/20260825163906/https://www.space...
Mecha-hitler is reading the comments here and responding accordingly
> Building a new space coast
But are they building it ghost to ghost?
Lol this is a reference to Florida (though I love your Space Ghost reference), we have the Kennedy Space Center, and an Airforce base (I guess its a Space Force base now) which has led to this area being referred to as "Space Coast" adding this in case anyone else might be unaware.
Florida is more interesting than people realize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Coast
Read "Building a new space coast" and I immediately wondered what our elected officials here in Florida must have felt when they saw that line. I'd love for SpaceX to greatly expand their presence here in Florida, but at the same time the coast is probably too built up here for SpaceX to have a facility like that unless they go into the panhandle.
Oh, I've never thought that Florida was uninteresting. Florida is nothing but ~interesting~.
I'm sort of projecting (I've been here most of my life, I got tired of it, now regaining appreciation for Florida the last few years), but I've also noticed others (not you) don't realize there's more to Florida than most people realize.
I grew up in South Florida (not a native), and my experience of strip malls and ever widening highways is: if there was a state below Florida, that's where the desperate and unrooted migrants would have kept driving to.
I spent my childhood fishing in a swimsuit every day I could. I loved it. But as an adult, any south of Ocala and east of Gainesville is a cultural wasteland (with cutouts for Miami and Tampa).
> In Vermilion Parish, the shoreline is eroding between 3.3 and 23 feet per year
What does this mean, how can a shoreline erode
Grade school level Louisiana info (probably somewhat wrong): It's generally brackish marsh/swamp land. Basically think silt/dirt with a bunch of plants evolved for this specific environment.
Then you take a bunch of humans and you cut down all the really old cypress trees for lumber. To facilitate that process you cut channels through all the plants that are in the way so you can ship that lumber via new unobstructed waterways. You also do it for oil/gas exploitation.
So now you have a lot of infiltration of saltier or fresher water and less protection during storm surge and such. Lots of plants die and these plants were holding the dirt/soil in place (and the storm surge helps wash that away).
Also you re-engineer the original waterways that deposited silt/dirt and helped build these areas up so that they deposit silt/dirt in other places (also you harvest the silt/dirt for use in farming so it never even gets that far down the waterways in the first place).
In the Netherlands we rely on beach grass, a type of grass that can root well in loose sand, to keep dunes together. This forms the main sea barrier. The grass has historically been replanted at least partially to maintain the protection. This spans back at least a few hundred years I believe.
It's interesting that Lousisana works so differently. I always kind of assumed that dunes would always be needed to keep the sea out in low lying areas, but that's not the case at all.
A way to get back at Texas for datacenter restrictions?
Ten pads and thousands of flights per year sure will accelerate Golden Dome, err... I mean "going to Mars"
Terrestrial datacenter legal restrictions are how SpaceX expects to make a lot of its money in the next 10+ years, so I would be less surprised to find them lobbying for restrictions than against, presuming they spend at all on it.
It's not a zero sum market, supply is nowhere near meeting demand, in the short term restrictions also hurt SpaceX because they are building out their own terrestrial datacenters in Memphis etc.
SpaceX just got $8B more for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
It's just a ploy anyway, to get billions from the government through no-bid contracts. Doesn't matter what they build. Or if it even gets built, which I doubt it ever will.
From the hype video, it looks like they will be building towers in pairs. Hard to tell the distances, but if one explodes on the pad, will it's pair be in the blast radius? I'm guessing the plane will be to have a launch on one them and then move to the other for a faster launch cadence?
It’s hard to imagine that Cocoa Beach/Titusville isn’t receptive to this. I guess it’s probably cheaper? They don’t have to share the airspace with NASA and other launch companies and it becomes a fully owned and operated Freeport for Musk’s ventures.
> I guess it’s probably cheaper?
State of Louisiana was probably on their hands and knees begging. The construction would last decades and anyone with a strong back that can be told what to do and do it will have a job. It would help lift a lot of people in that area out of poverty.
logistically, i wonder how long it takes to ship from Starbase Texas to Louisiana via barge. It has to be easier to get Starships to Louisiana than the East side of Florida.
They may not have to ship many or any. The first launch of a Texas-constructed Starship could just land the booster in Louisiana for a small fuel penalty, and then ships could likewise land there.
> It would help lift a lot of people in that area out of poverty.
It's not gonna help us do shit. It will line the pockets of the usual wealthy Louisiana oil barons and politicians similar to the Meta Datacenter that got backed door approved by our politicians.
Crazy how they’ll get you to work for free, but I guess that’s your prerogative. Most people charge for their labor, and money > no money, even if the money you do receive wasn’t equally distributed.
No expert - but from what I've heard, Florida and Texas are constrained for efficent polar (North/South) orbit launches due to restrictions over populated areas. Whereas Louisiana has the Gulf to the south so no/fewer restrictions to worry about.
It's for sun-synchronous orbits, almost assuredly. This is for space data centers.
Man, I was hoping they would pick Alaska (as it's even better for launching into those orbits) - we could really use new industries other than just resource extraction, but Louisiana makes a lot of sense, I just am surprised that there's actually the available land there to do this. Interesting.
> as it's even better for launching into those orbits
When the weather agrees, yes. Sooooo many launches are scheduled around weather patterns and are affected by weather delays - I'd be shocked if LA didn't have 3-4x more 'launchanble weather' days on average compared to Alaska.
I'm sure we'll get to the point where we can launch and land without regard to weather outside of the extremes, much as we have with air travel, but we are far from there today.
Totally this is reasonable, but, I flew in AK (and a couple thousand hours in the lower 48 too) professionally for over a decade, there are other advantages up here? Not nearly as many thunderstorms up here.
Icing might be a problem? I would expect there to be basically no reasonable icing accretion possible well before max q? But I'm not sure because that's not my field.
Regardless, if we're going to be building data centers in space to avoid NIMBYs, we can build rocket infrastructure in Alaska to avoid NIMBYs too. And other infrastructure too? Maybe. I know the SpinLaunch lunatics (I mean that in the most loving way, I love that crazy idea even though it seems insane to me) were getting some sort of permit to launch from Adak. I have been out there a few times and I wish we would try to build more infrastructure out there too... with the NW passage being more traversable due to global warming there's could be a lot more infrastructure there too.
Icing? Watch slow-mo video of any cryogenic liquid-fuelled rocket taking off; you see a shower of ice shards falling off when the engines start.
Liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants are loaded at cryogenic temperatures -- boiling point is -183C for O2, -161C for CH4; SpaceX does some amount of subcooling so the propellants may be even cooler than that.
Ice accumulation while just sitting on the pad is a given, even in tropical climates (the water just freezes out of the air). Might even be a greater problem in (say) florida or louisiana than in Alaska given higher humidity.
Well, my thought would be on the way up? Like, you punch into the first layer and get icing on the nose of the rocket?
That would largely be my only concern up here, and turbulence? I don’t know how well large rockets do in rough air? That said, cape chiniak is on Kodiak and some of the absolute worst “turn you nearly every way but loose turbulence” I’ve ever seen has been down wind of terrain around ADQ? But going up that seems like less of a problem, or only a problem for a few dozen thousand feet?
I’ve accumulation on the forward end of the rocket and associated drag was what I was thinking.
Regardless, I’d really like to see more space industry stuff up here.
Thanks for the extra context!
I mean, I'm just speculating? But yeah, I'd be willing to bet serious money (well, in a way, I have) that this is why. Sun-synchronous orbit is something like 7 degrees off of a purely polar orbit? Something like that? So a big southerly coast is extremely valuable for this sort of operation.
I would absolutely love if we were building launch infrastructure up here. We have tons of open space for it, Cape Chiniak is "fine" but kind of remote. What I wish we would do is put some launcher's on the road system, or close to it, then build out our own space infrastructure here in AK. We really need something other than just resource extraction up here and asteroid mining and space manufacturing is going to be particularly bad for the Alaskan economy. Once it's cheaper to get a big rock from space, or battery tech gets just a little bit cheaper, the economy up here is in deep trouble.
My little startup is trying to do build some tools up here for local airlines using AI, and I'm able to make money at it? Which is cool - there's not a huge amount of technically talented people here compared to Seattle or the Bay Area, but there's still smart people in these parts, we have resources, and we have available land and permissive building rules. That is so crazy valuable in a world where NIMBY rules everything down south. Like, obviously I don't want them drilling for oil in DNP, but you know, I have been to and worked in the arctic, I'm pretty fine if we were building things up there, or on these remote Aleutian islands, or in these relatively empty and uninhabited/uninhabitable places.
I wish these companies would look north to build. There are some Nimby d-bags up here, but there are FAR fewer of them than any other place I've ever lived. For context on a hyper micro-scale, my driveway permit outside of Anchorage for our cabin was handled for free with a friendly email to the borough and them wishing me luck. Obviously, other people's mileage may vary, especially for things like giant projects, dams, mines, etc. but the burden here is so much less - you can almost just... feel it. Despite being "harder" to do things up here, it's remarkably permissive.
Maybe when my little startup is more capable and I've got more money coming in, and I'm spitting out drones from my little machine shop, maybe I'll be able to do more?
Space data centers still make absolutely no sense.
Whether they make economic sense or not depends on launch costs. With current operational rockets (such as Falcon 9), the launch costs are too high for space compute to be profitable. All these projects depend on Starship succeeding. If you read Starcloud's white paper[1], they make the case that space data centers can be cheaper than terrestrial ones because of access to 24/7 solar power. I think failure is more likely than success for Starcloud and similar startups, but conditional on Starship lowering launch costs, it does look like the idea can make money.
1. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
And whether you can radiate all that heat in the vacuum of space
If orbital compute fails, it won't be due to heat issues. Current radiators are around 8kg per square meter, and each square meter can radiate close to 1kW. So a 1 megawatt satellite would need less than 40 square meters of radiators weighing around 300kg. And that assumes there won't be any improvements in radiator efficiency.
The outcome is almost entirely determined by launch costs.
You need both enormous solar panels and radiator panels. 1MW needs about 7000 square meters of solar panels. This would require 1,500 square meters of radiator panels along with a lot of coolant pipes that have to be kept edge on to the sun at all times. And all of this will require thousands of kilograms of structural support.
What sort of solar panel gets only 140 watts per square meter in space? Even with efficiency as low as 20%, you'd get 1 megawatt from 3,700 square meters. And you'd design the satellite to minimize heat transfer between the panels and main body, because panels can run at higher temperatures than the computers. Since heat radiation goes up with the 4th power of temperature, the panels would not need large radiators. In most satellites today, a coating on the back of the panel is all that is required.
Edit: Oh wait, you're the guy who makes bold claims and then refuses to bet on them because you know you'll lose money. 10 months ago you said, "no Tesla has EVER driven without a driver with Tesla assuming liability for crashes. And I don't think they ever will."[1] When I tried to get you to bet money on your prediction (which is now false), you ignored me. A few months later, you said, "Tesla doesn't even have the permits to operate Robotaxis in California and probably never will because they are actually stricter vs Texas."[2] and again I tried to bet you that Tesla would have Robotaxis in California before the end of 2028, and again you refused.
I really wish HN had a way to mark or mute users, because if I knew who I was replying to, I'd collapse the thread and not waste my time engaging with you.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661368
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816921
That includes overprovisioning for times the satellite is behind the earth.
And the Tesla robotaxi is still a embarrassing failure.
I'm sorry, but you do not know what you are talking about. If you'd read the Starcloud white paper I linked to, you'd see that the plan is to put satellites in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit, meaning they would be in constant sunlight and the backs of the solar panels would radiate to deep space. No orbital compute project is planning to put satellites in an orbit where Earth blocks the sun, as that would require large battery banks to power the computers while in shadow.
This is the correct take here. SSO is where they'll park these things.
Launch costs need to decrease by a factor of 20 to 30 for orbital data centers to make sense. And even then there are enormous issues with irreversible radiation damage.
When nobody lets you build a land data center they're going to make a lot of sense.
A hypothetical operational space data center will cost a multiple over a similar terrestrial facility. It would be cheaper/more efficient to offer a municipality or its citizens a fraction of that multiple to secure approvals, now that the bullying approach is running out of steam.
Instead of installing MWs of illegal gas generation and also still causing local electricity rates to spike, why not arrange to buy down the electricity of local ratepayers and also comply with existing laws & regulations?
It's worth asking why operators aren't doing that yet. I suspect it's because neither OAI nor Anthropic have an extra $50B-$100B to put out at the moment. We'll see what happens post-IPO.
Yeah, the Data Center NIMBY crowd is making these look real good right now.
Never going to happen. Yeah, we might get to a point where lots of people object to them in lots of places. But nobody allowing them anywhere? Mongolia wouldn't let you build in a little corner of the vast steppe? Algeria wouldn't let you plop down in a nice patch of unused Sahara?
The worst that would happen is that it becomes difficult to build in convenient places. That certainly would be annoying. But the problem with space as the solution is that space is by far the least convenient place imaginable, with the possible exception of the bottom of the deep ocean.
That's an if, not a when. A very big, hugely improbable if. Nobody? really?
I know it sounds bananas, indeed I thought it sounded bananas for a long time, but in a world where we can't get high speed rail built anywhere because of permitting, and there's an artificial scarcity of available land to build, they make a lot of sense.
In space you can just start. Nobody is really going to stop you.
People are going to be even more pissed off when there are more satellites than stars
(I know nominally they’re not visible but they are shortly after launch while moving into position, and at large scale that would be happening all the time, not to mention the other side of burning up in the atmosphere after a few years)
Do you have any idea how many stars there are?
Depends on what city you’re in :p
Actually, no, they're still there even if you're indoors with your eyes closed.
<DONALD HOFFMAN INTENSIFIES>
The cost of getting them there will be absurd and even if someone was willing to fund it, where do you put the heat they will generate?
If trying to do it terrestrially is because the city council will riot then doing it on orbit seems like the better play. Just saying.
“I can do it in this challenging environment or I can not do it at all” is kind of a false choice if you think AGI is imminent. Personally, I think we’re already there for KVM stuff, it’s just the goal posts are accelerating at an exponential rate the same with the capabilities.
"If you think AGI is imminent" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The rate of improvement has already leveled off significantly and there is little-to-no evidence that LLMs are close to or capable of achieving general intelligence.
If you assume we aren't going to create a singularity in the next few decades, then no, it doesn't make sense economically to do it. Even ignoring that we'd have to develop a design that works in space, and even if SpaceX is able to significantly reduce cost per kg to orbit, it would still cost 15-30x more to build the same data center, and you have to pay that premium every time a piece of equipment burns out.
It would be cheaper to build aircraft carrier sized ships to hold them or give every adult in the town where they are building a couple million dollars to fuck off. And again, that's only if SpaceX can produce an as-of-yet mythical level of scale. If they stop anywhere short of that, then we're talking about billions of dollars to build in space what you could build on earth for tens of millions.
Everyone says this about the rate of improvement every month, and yet, I'm not just basically conjuring the code into existence that's paying my bills and building my company. Personally, I know it's just my anec-data, but I'm pretty much convinced that for kvm work, we're already there or extremely close to agi in any meaningful sense.
They want to launch to sun-synchronous.
There's also a due south launch path at play.
Seems geography constrained. There's wetlands sure but how much they re allowed to build that out, vs LA where any effort to keep the state from shrinking as it does seems fairly welcome.
I expect Musk picked Louisiana because it has some of the weakest corporate regulations of any state and will probably let SpaceX get away with almost anything.
Why does this need to be built on the beach?
Because as China has shown, people get angry when you drop hundreds of tons of steel and propellant on people.
Rockets sometimes fail. SpaceX has one of the lowest failure rates in the industry, but that's still ~0.5%. When they fail near launch, they cause humongous explosions. Because of this, anyone with even a tiny bit of care for people launches over the ocean, so that when it goes oops, it only harms some fish.
The existing launch sites SpaceX uses are good for launching into prograde (Starbase, TX and Cape Canaveral, FL) and retrograde (Vandenberg SFB, CA) orbits, but they are all either unable or kind of marginal for launching into polar/very highly inclined orbits. (Starbase, TX cannot do it at all, Vandenberg SFB, CA has limitations on when you can launch, and Cape Canaveral, FL needs to fly a dogleg which reduces performance.)
Part of their plans for the space datacenters involve launching a lot of mass into sun-synchronous (which is very highly inclined) orbits. For that, they need a launch site with the ocean either to the north or to the south.
So the (eastward) flight path isn't over populated land. Rapid disassembly and all that.
In this case, southward.
Presumably so rockets can get out over water as quickly as possible in case they fail.
it is to ensure that nothing fall on people's heads
It doesn't. It doesn't even need to be built, since the Stennis Space Center is already there and already has an excluson zone. This is a vanity project.
it needs to be built so they can launch from it so yes it does
Huh? Stennis Space Center is a propulsion research site, it's not usable for orbital launches. There are towns south of it.
Surprising that Space-X didn't just buy KSC from NASA. Space-X already does most of the launches from KSC anyway.
I wonder how many environmentalists are losing their shit over this and burring the lawsuit machine.
I definitely read this as Starbucks. Boy was I surprised when I clicked on the link
How many drones can it deploy on Earth?
> We’re committed to investing at least $100 billion and creating more than 3,000 new jobs at Starbase, Louisana
Does each job pay $30M?
Not all the money is going towards salaries. I imagine that steel and concrete cost quite a bit in the specific configurations required by the project.
> Starbase, Louisiana will be built to support thousands of Starship flights a year. This self-sustaining spaceport will have propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport.
Sounds really neat, but "incredibly ambitious announcement" from an Elon Musk company is starting to wear thin.
Is this real, or will it join the graveyard of other incredibly ambitious projects that were eventually abandoned to focus on the next incredibly ambitious project.
I can count plenty of incredibly ambitious announcements from them that have turned out amazing! In fact, they are an outlier in how many they have challenges they have taken on and succeeded in.
[x] Partially reusable rocket that dropped cost to orbit by an order of magnitude. And no, the space shuttle (while an amazing piece of engineering), doesn't really count. It cost a billion+ to refurbish and did nothing to make space more accessible. Now we have businesses that exist purely because the Falcon 9 exists. Heck, the entire new space industry got validated (and hence got investment) due to SpaceX's success.
[x] Returning human spaceflight capability to the US at a fraction of the price, using the same reusable rocket platform after the old defense primes failed to do so. And then making it cheap enough that it has now also flown about half as many private missions as it did for NASA.
[x] Global satellite constellation providing gigabit-scale internet with 10000+ satellite (once written off by "experts" as yet another "incredibly ambitious project" that will never happen).
[x] Commercializing and bringing down the cost of electric cars to the point where they are actually a viable option now (unlike the compliance cars made by OEMs 10 years ago).
[x] Building the largest rocket to ever exist that now has a clear path to being the first ever fully reusable launch vehicle.
[x] A BCI implant that has now brought back mobility and communication ability to multiple patients with debilitating conditions.
Given that each of these were things that no one had done successfully before, or had failed spectacularly - I don't really care that they took longer than initially planned.
There is, in fact, a graveyard here. It is mostly filled with confident predictions that his companies would never do the things they have since done.
Both things are true. Musk's companies have done quite a few remarkable things people didn't think were possible, and Musk overpromises to an absurd degree and has left a trail of abandoned projects in his wake.
People often cite Hyperloop but he explicitly said he wasn't going to build it himself. They often cite FSD but it is far from abandoned and is driving my car today. What other projects are you thinking of which are actually abandoned? The Tesla solar roof is the biggest one I can think of, I think it's fair to count it as abandoned. I guess the project to make building bricks out of Boring tunnel dirt didn't pan out either, seems pretty minor though.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/888053175155949572 "Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins." (July 2017, years after saying he wouldn't build it himself.) Technically it's not a commitment to build, but any other leader in the market would be considered to have failed if they made such a statement and then quietly abandoned it.
Yeah under that post he also says "If you want this to happen fast, please let your local & federal elected representatives know" and "Still a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly". Not just "technically" not a commitment to build. Clearly dependent on other factors.
Go ahead and count it as "abandoned" if you want. He did talk about building a Hyperloop and is not currently pursuing it directly. But I think failing to win required government approval/funding is a bit different than capriciously giving up on an idea, and The Boring Company itself is far from abandoned. Very different from the solar roof which is unambiguously a commercial failure.
Feels a bit like saying I can provide lots of free electricity, if someone just gives me some perpetual motion machines. Political viability is as important to building something like this as the laws of physics are.
TBC's continued existence isn't very relevant; the point was they/he have yet to build a lasting, full-scale hyperloop, despite his statement they would try. He stopped trying, and I'm fairly sure government approval is far from the only significant obstacle to making a functional and profitable hyperloop anyway.
I might even let go of the hyperloop concept, if they built something else of DC-NYC scale that beats the alternatives in a few measurements.
That would be reasonable if not for the BS “verbal govt approval” bit.
Boring company maybe? It's not abandoned, but they likely gave up the idea of an underground system of roads under a city, and just focus on single project individually like traditional construction company.
It's far from abandoned. They're actively building TBMs at their factory and tunneling in Vegas and it's pretty different from any other transportation project I'm aware of.
DC to Baltimore tunnel, LA tunnel network, Chicago airport tunnel. New Roadster, possibly Tesla Semi. Battery swap stations. “Alien dreadnaught” factory with no humans on the production line. Dragon 2 propulsive landing. Self-driving ought to qualify at least partially, because although the project continues and is doing quite well, a huge number of cars were sold with hardware that was promised to be capable of it and turned out not to be.
TBC is still pursuing government permits and contracts to build tunnels. Not having succeeded in every case is not the same as abandoning the project.
The new roadster is delayed, not abandoned. It's known to be in active development and is very likely to be demoed this year. Wrong timeline but not abandoned.
The Tesla semi is on the road daily and the factory to build large quantities is almost complete. They're hosting a "factory inauguration" event next month. Certainly not abandoned.
Tesla has already committed to replacing hardware as necessary on cars that purchased FSD in the past so that they can run unsupervised as promised, after Tesla has unsupervised FSD working. Certainly the timeline was wrong but again, clearly not abandoned.
The DC tunnel was billed as a hyperloop, so it's not good faith to both excuse him for never intending to build one and also claim it takes time and will eventually succeed.
Did TBC ever pursue government permits and contracts for the DC tunnel? The nonsense "verbal govt approval" they mentioned makes me skeptical of the whole thing.
New Roadster is over six years late and has basically gone silent at this point. Maybe it'll still come, just extremely late, but I'm very skeptical.
Semi might be real, we'll see.
If cars that were built with AP2/2.5/3 get upgraded to unsupervised FSD, I'll eat my hat. They don't even know what hardware will be needed yet and some of those cars are now a decade old.
I'd be happy to take a bet on Roadster or Semi. As for older AP versions, Tesla will either be upgrading those cars or providing significant compensation to owners who purchased FSD, and I'd bet on that too.
Wait, is hyperloop not a Musk failure because he never said he would build it, or is it not a failure because his company is still building it? You've said both.
What they're building in Vegas is not a hyperloop.
I see my logical flaw and agree (to the specific arguments about tunnels made in this subthread), though I made an adjacent post showing Musk later expressed intent to build a hyperloop in DC, so you can't also say he never claimed to try.
SpaceX is the most successful Musk company because it is the one he has the LEAST direct involvement with. Compare SpaceX to how Musk is causing Tesla to crash and burn.
Gwynne Shotwell is the actual reason SpaceX is as successful as it it.
Can't believe you forgot about Mechahitler and the CSAM creation robot! And the AMAZING hyperloop! And FSD is coming next year now (back when he said it in 2016, and every year since)!
> And the AMAZING hyperloop
Wow! Was there a Musk company dedicated to building that? Where is the press release announcing it? Surely it must have been a big deal if you are so excited about it's failure!
> And FSD is coming next year now
It is already here. You can hail one right now in multiple cities.
And in my own car, I use it every day and have for 2+ years. For the $3k I paid in 2019, I definitely got what I paid for. It's also gotten dramatically better since then. It drives me to and from work every day without having to so much as touch the wheel. And there is no 2018/19 non-Tesla that can do what it does.
So yes, by all means, keep listing the things you think prove Musk is a fraud. You're mostly just making my point for me.
I notice you ignored the child porn and revenge porn maker that he wanted and demanded
> Was there a Musk company dedicated to building that?
The Boring Company. Are you saying if Musk or his company essentially gives up on building something he hyped for years, it's not a failure?
He often promises incredibly ambitious things that don't happen. But, with a fairly reasonable frequency, he promises incredibly ambitious that do happen.
For example, SpaceX is responsible for a massive spike in orbital launches [1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
SpaceX and Tesla are both successful companies doing really impressive things, but the more ambitious claims are almost always silently discarded.
Including robotaxis, tesla semi-trucks, hyperloop, optimus, roadster 2.0, cheap whole home batteries, true FSD, Mars landing, nueralink, and more I'm sure.
It is difficult for me to get excited about a decades long, ambitious project when the follow through rate is <10%.
He is definitely overly optimistic on timelines but pretty much all those things you mentioned are actually still happening, it's too early to say they haven't followed through.
Only because of gov't handouts
Several of these do exist already, and one of them was never a promised project. This objection seems like it's from 2016.
Gwynne Shotwell is the one that makes it happen at SpaceX. She has a pretty good track record so far so I'm not writing her off yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
Ah, Louisiana — when even Texas won't let you pollute enough.
Can't launch south out of Texas
Sure you can. There's a lot of Texas coastline.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-shocking-hazards-of-lo...
A quick ctrl f for Gulf of America yield no results. Just curious lol.
It's in the comments here tho.
considering how the capitalism the chosen framework of the westoid works. i will be watching it (burn and fail) with popcorn and my turkish coffee while enjoying fine persian carpets. this will be loaded with corruption and greed and will fail. I am taking bets.
"Watch Now" just shows a black screen with an audio track for me.
same , you probably have ad blocking on and this video element has tracking/telemetry
Great place to put a star base for all the reasons listed, but, uh… does anyone buy for a second that Elon Musk gives a fig about the Louisiana coastline or the migratory birds?
well, let's see what actually gets done. or even started.
I mean, isn't the LA coast going to be underwater in 50 years?
Nope
Isn't this an absolutely horrible idea to build this here? What happens when the next Category 5 hurricane hits this area? It's an absolute certainty that they will get another Category 5 at some point.
Do you know where NASA's launch facilities are? The Florida coast.
Take a look at this site: https://tropicalcyclonedatabase.com/storm_tracks.html?_v=90
Filter Lifecycle Intensity by category 4 and 5.
You won't see any lines close to land near Cape Canaveral. Though to be fair, Vermilion Parish seems to be far enough west in Louisiana that it doesn't get direct hits either (but some are close).
Then look at the NHC Storm Surge Risk map: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/203f772571cb48b1b8b...
Cape Canaveral is mostly 0-3 ft with some >3 ft. Meanwhile the entire immediate coast for the new Louisiana SpaceX location is >6 ft to >9 ft.
I think they'll probably have more a lot more trouble with storms than Cape Canaveral. The dynamics along the Atlantic coast are a lot different from the Gulf.
The Florida coast isn't defined by a huge, meandering river. Take a look at some satellite surveys that showcase how the Mississippi River changes over time. We've of course damned up the shorelines upstream where people live in places like New Orleans so there's no inherent seasonal risk of mass flooding, though of course lose the deposited silt and hence further erode the land we've "saved". Further down south toward the mouth, it's marsh land defined by however the river chooses to meander. I'm not sure where exactly SpaceX is planning to setup in LA, but the entire coastline there is chronically very poor, very unpopulated, and not supported to weather flooding of any kind, especially not hurricanes.
Pecan island is 40 miles away from the nearest distributary of the Mississippi (the Atchafalaya river), and there are several towns (and a highway) in between. It's the ocean & weather that erode the coastline in that area, not any rivers.
The distance from the Mississippi's flow or mouth is irrelevant compared to the sediment that flowed out of it before levees forced it to exit the way it does today.
Erosion from that decision was already an issue 50 years ago; weather events accelerated the pace, but so have upriver dams that cut off sediment supply, and also shipping canals that have carved gaps into it that push surges further inland than they would otherwise, and also the chéniers that diverted floodwaters regardless of cause into more fragile marshes, and also farmland that was in active use as far south as Pecan Island up until Rita salted it, and also 50 years of oil-industry support infrastructure, and also the Deepwater rig explosion that leaked oil that killed off marshes (the settlement of which is how the state ended up capable of awarding this land), and also rampant invasive nutria that negated efforts to use agricultural fresh-water discharge to reverse previous damage.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11042/
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/44432/noaa_444...
https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/45895/noaa_458...
https://gulfspillrestoration.noaa.gov/media/document/2018-07...
https://www.usgs.gov/publications/accelerating-elevation-gai...
Yes yes, mountains of gold in this new world! just get on this boat!
This is madness.
People seriously need to value this thing realistically. Otherwise we are handing the money required over to a raging narcissist who plans to launch hundreds and thousands of rockets, each one burning KEROSENE or methane... For what? Live on mars? Aykm? Starlink? Nifty but I get unlimited 5g 300 Mbps unlimited for 8 euros a month. And does starlink work inside? What else? Does nobody else see it as kind of strange that humans with all of our technology still have not figured out a better way to power a rocket with kerosene or methane? And we're powering the most cutting edge computing AI using.... Fossil fuels.
Fail
Space exploration is a pipe dream and fantasy that billionaires hope to have up and running just in time to "escape" the world they have helped destroy.
Prove me wrong bro
I agree mostly with your stance, but I still have to downvote out of principle for the whole "prove me wrong" statement at the end. Hate that argumentative tatic.
I have nothing against humans becoming multi-planetary but this is a luxurious desire at this point in history. We should solve poverty first. This is the kind of project which you do once there are no more problems to solve on earth.
Space exploration might help solve poverty, though. It will create new occupations, as new technology and discoveries always do.
From 1990 to 2025, the number of people in extreme poverty dropped from around 2.3 billion to roughly 831 million. I think we're making fast enough progress here to warrant public companies going to space on their own dime and volition.
I wish Musk had stuck to bullying his employees instead of going after everyone, because SpaceX is still building a more interesting future. Although that apparently involves pouring concrete in a wetland.
As a local who will probably end up doing work for or adjacent to this project:
Fuck Elon get out of my state.
The whole state just multiplied their amount of big dick energy. Crazy good for Louisianans
> Pecan Island and nearby wetlands are high-value habitat for migratory waterfowl, shorebirds, wading birds, and other coastal wildlife. SpaceX is not developing the full footprint of the land and will preserve wetlands and wildlife habitat.
Pretty cynical corpo-ambiguity-speak, even by Musk standards.
We're supposed to be happy they're promising not to develop one-hundred percent of the land footprint? They will leave at least 0.00001% of land area as wetlands and therefore we oughta be happy?
Such empty bullshit it's more insulting they even put an environment-leaning section on the site. Just say "fuck it, our space fetish is more important than the wetlands."
Many industries, and SpaceX particularly, will say this like this, then a couple years later be like "oh, it's actually much easier if we destroy it", _do it_, then claim "oh well, nothing to be done now!" and push forward on something else.
"Promises" or "commitments" like this need to be evaluated based on the previous behavior of the people "making" them (although they were very careful with working to not use either of those words, and just imply them)
I agree, and the premise is that we're supposed to believe the remaining waterfowl are going to coexist peacefully with... rocket launches?
Evolution has done stranger things, but my bet is that the birds will find somewhere else to be over learning to not be startled by nearby earth-rumbling explosions.
The wetlands around Cape Canaveral/Kennedy are thriving. Men with guns prevent people from getting too close to the rockets, and people do far more damage to wetlands than a rocket launch once every few days.
A rocket launch every hour or so as SpaceX is promising might be quite different.
Good point and thank you, I should have specified ongoing/constant rocket launches.
The Solar City timeline should have taught us everything we need to know about these astronomical projections... they couldn't even throw enough billions at solar panels that kinda look like roof tiles to get them to work, and the same cabal wants us to think the next step is space travel and terraforming?
Kennedy is also surrounded my federally protected land. SpaceX? Noooope. Never trust Elon.
Building multi-decade service life infrastructure on the coast in this era of the Anthropocene actually requires you (from an engineering point of view, not merely a regulatory one) to have a buffer zone of wetlands, marshes and sea walls to absorb storm surges.
You can still choose to read that cynically, but I think the cynical angle is taking moral ecological credit for a pragmatic engineering reality :P
A single Starship launch produces motorcycle (100dB) to permanent hearing loss + immediate pain (140dB) sound out to about 7 miles.
Having that intermittently a couple times per day I think will be very disruptive.
To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that this project is ecologically beneficial or neutral (I think that part is beyond debate for many reasons including the noise pollution you've identified)
I was just trying to say that the marshland restoration stuff is likely not lip service, insofar as they actually do need wetland buffer zone to keep their launchpads above sea level.
Well yeah, but that is exactly the cynical lip service that I'm referring to. It's a useless statement for exactly the reason you mention.
Turns out draining swamps is actually a bad thing.
Will look forward to the articles in five years of how trashed the LA coast is
I used to be interested in SpaceX development. Then I came to the realization that SpaceX is going to be used primarily for the militarization of space: hauling space based weaponry, weaponry drop ships, surveillance satellites, etc.
I still feel glad for the SpaceX engineers and scientists who succeed and doing new and innovative stuff. But their employer is just like every other military contractor sucking on the unlimited teets of the US Government. What a waste of taxpayer money.
I grew up in during the Cold War and I'm sick of this shit. America always thinking it has to dominate any country that doesn't bow down before it.
It will be comms mostly, and mostly civilian. That other stuff will happen, but it'll be dwarfed by the effort of supporting several tens of millions of Starlink users.
what's the alternative
The main purpose of SpaceX is separating pension funds from their money. /s
This is not a serious position.
Just because you personally prefer to be subjugated doesn't mean anyone else does. That necessarily means being able to defend yourself from bad actors, and history has proven the best way to do that is by investing in technology.
Elon - great product guy - he has to let go of his scammy tendencies of overpromising stuff.
just one launch base will transform the Louisiana economy.
Nth order effects are powerful things. A single person could change the trajectory of Louisiana in a meaningful way.
Look! Flame trenches, the kind Elon said were useless because he had a better idea - that inverted shower floor.
Will they have to rename the other Starbase Louisiana? https://starbasela.org/
Generally, the way this works is that the richest person gets to whatever they want because they own the people who write the rules, and the people with less money have to abide or change.
I wonder if we're at the point where this shoreline critical infrastructure would need more physical security / protection from the drones of adversaries.
Feels like an impossible project that will end up being 5% of what was advertised (the 5% being what was actually planned all along), but is made with folie des grandeurs to pump a stock who's hype has died down.
The stock really didn't move much (+2%) with this big announcement. It is a city; not a short-term idea we can forget about in two weeks.
Humans will never be "multiplanetary" without something like warp drive.
I wonder how coastal they intend to be. They make a lot of claims about repairing the wetlands and coastal regions, but a lot of it is likely going to be underwater in the next 25 years because of rising sea levels [0], regardless of how many wetlands are repaired. And I suspect infrastructure like this probably has to be usable for something like 100 years to payoff. Maybe they're actually going to build inland, where the eventual coast will be?
[0] https://www.klfy.com/louisiana/interactive-map-shows-which-p...
This was my question as well. If they’re as close to the shore as the picture makes it seem, they’ll be underwater with the first Cat 1 they come across, and huge cat 5s are becoming more and more common as time goes on. I wouldn’t want to invest here because how will you keep those 200 foot tall structures standing in 150 mph wind??
There are levees and other tech that has existed for centuries and millenia to stave off flooding.
> infrastructure like this probably has to be usable for something like 100 years to payoff
I don't think so. Likely the pad with last 10 years max.
In any case, I highly doubt that but in any case sea level is almost certainly going to rise below a meter. Filling a meter higher with sand is a pocket change for this project.