In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions.

This dumb fuck. Unfortunately, his boosters will be all-in on this messaging. Whatever.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Absolutely. And if the AI market takes a hit it will barely affect a government contracted space program that will get a taxpayer funded bailout if it has any trouble at all.

      • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        They don’t always bail them out. Sometimes they force sell them to their competitors.

          • rumba@lemmy.zip
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            3 days ago

            Yup. Who’s in charge of determining if he gets bailed out? How much money does each of them need to say yes?

            Oh, they won’t take money? What influence does he need to buy?

            For the amount of money he’s set to get, there’s noone that’ll turn down a nice gift of some sort.

  • skozzii@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    Bobs : “What is it you do?”

    Elon : "Well–well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don’t have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can’t you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people? "

      • Taleya@aussie.zone
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        2 days ago

        I’m…actually not sure how the rules would apply, how far up various airspaces go or if it’s an Antarctica kinda deal.

        Pretty sure he’d been violating all sorts of human trafficking laws tho

  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    How long until he rebrands Tesla to X Automobiles?

    Naming everything to “X” is a cartoon villain move, except we don’t have a superhero to fight him.

  • SabinStargem@lemmy.today
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    3 days ago

    This seems like a good way to turn a golden goose into a turducken. Elon really needed some of Aesop’s fables in his upbringing.

    • deltapi@lemmy.world
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      100%. They’ve announced the plans for SpaceX to have an IPO, this will basically eliminate all of his losses even if they just shut down xAI immediately following acquisition (which they won’t do just yet, because people are still bag holding AI investments.)
      This guy might be a dumb fuck, but he’s the smartest dumb fuck in the billionaire game.

      Edit: Some of his capital investors might have told him that they want out of xAI because they see where the wind is blowing. This gets them out with profit if they pull it off fast enough.
      This (SpaceX IPO) is going to be a massive rug pull, for the 2nd round of public traders and I bet that he’s got structure in place to ensure that even after selling billions of dollars of shares he still holds 51% or some shit, or that his annual compensation is $0+1% of the company.
      10 years ago I would have bought into a SpaceX IPO. Not today.

      • Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I don’t think he is dumb. He is without decency though. He doesn’t care who he hurts and I have no doubt he will hurt a lot of people in the future.

  • cronenthal@discuss.tchncs.de
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    4 days ago

    Financial trickery is what this is. Rolling one failing business into the next, Tesla will follow soon. It’s incredible that this is even legal, but of course nothing matters anymore in Trump’s America.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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      The stupid thing is that it‘s perfectly legal as long as nobody looks into it and because it‘s a US corporation nobody will look into it.

      • golli@sopuli.xyz
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        3 days ago

        Is he actually selling shares? Imo this move might actually be more about gaining more control percentage wise.

        Similar to how he increased his control when he folded Twitter into xAI (at a imo very favorable valuation for him), which gave him a larger share of the combined company.

        If he merges space x and xAI (especially at a high valuation of the latter), he would own more of the combined company as he owns more of xAI then space x.

        For me the only surprising thing is how existing shareholders seemingly just let him dictate these mergers and valuations. But I guess they face a dilemma where valuation depend so much on Elon that they have to play by his rules or risk loosing even more.

    • KryptonBlur@slrpnk.net
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      4 days ago

      Every article needs to read “Elon Musk, who’s name repeatedly appeared in the Epstein files”

  • cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    Can we also take a moment to acknowledge how utterly unhinged this part is?

    “This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!”

    • masterofn001@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      A couple short stories on the matter:

      Is there a god? (Less than a page, but says it all)

      Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing. He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe – ninety-six billion planets – into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies. Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment’s silence he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.” Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel. Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.” “Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.” He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?” The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay. “Yes, now there is a God.” Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch. A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

      (Fredric Brown, “Answer”)

      https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

      Or

      The Last Question - Isaac Asimov

      https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/the-last-question/

    • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip
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      yeah wtf… a sentient sun? First of all, how do we know the sun isn’t sentient? And if it was/is why assume it would give a shit about humanity?

      But also wtf… Like, he’s trying to merge the sun with AI? Am I taking it too literally? He’s trying to create god? So he can ask for forgiveness for being a pedo pos?

      • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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        4 days ago

        It’s a bunch of technobabble loosely related to his harebrained scheme to launch a fuckload of solar powered AI servers into LEO.

        • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip
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          Okay, so I am taking it too literally because he’s not even trying to be accurate with the description. What a weirdo.

      • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
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        “Sentience” is like this hand-waving magic word. Defined typically as the ability to experience sensations and feelings, it’s very anthropic and egocentric.

        We know that life evolved on Earth, to include our own species. We know that much life on Earth has an internal sense for pain and pleasure, as well as many instinctual drives like self-preservation. We know that our species knows things, and we know that other species don’t have the same depth in their capacity to know things. We’ve demonstrated that other species don’t seem to understand the world in the same way as us humans. Yet, we’ve never quite figured out what any other species knows. We’ve never modeled their form of sentience, let alone our own. We only really know about sentience intuitively, via our own experience. We judge everything’s capacity as though it’s either less than, equal to, or greater than our own — without consideration for how something might just be different. Not higher or lower, but parallel in a way.

        I don’t know what sun sentience would be like, not any more than I already know why any sentience is like (beside my own), but I can say one thing for sure. Our own sentience is heavily influenced by bias: social, political, legal, economical, financial, emotional, religious, moral, and scientific bias. Peel back those layers of bias, what’s left? Sun sentience might be something like that, like a blank slate that just exists.

        • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip
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          4 days ago

          Big tangent, but I just want to say I love this reply, and it’s a great example of what reddit has lost and lemmy has preserved.

          Speaking of other species and knowledge, whale songs IMO are something like the dialup sound we used to hear when our internet went over the land line. Apparently they can hear each other from an ocean away as well. Whales may have entire religions for all we know. It’s fascinating to think about, and they’re right here on this planet with us; the Sun only knows what else is out there.

        • PointyFluff@lemmy.ml
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          4 days ago

          The sun is not only sentient, but sapient and aware of it’s eternal damnation; be thankful you can’t hear it screaming.

          • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
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            3 days ago

            if there was a infinite line, like so:

            <——sentient——sapient——> 
            

            … where it marks each stage of “awareness,” where would you personally think humans go on that line?


            If you think it belongs over the “sapient” point, I’d think that’s very interesting. Isn’t it also interesting that we bond most well with animals that exhibit human-like social behavior?

      • hector@lemmy.today
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        4 days ago

        Any sort of universal god would not care about the daily life of bacteria on a piece of dust in an unimaginably larger system.

        • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip
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          4 days ago

          Exactly.

          Though, if life is truly rare, they may value us for that reason, but there’s no reason to believe they’d improve anything for us.

          • hector@lemmy.today
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            4 days ago

            Yeah it’s a coin toss whether they would want to check us out further, or use the galactic form of chlorine on the area.

            But odds are they would neither specifically know nor care. In likelihood I imagine there is other life, and not all based on carbon and water. There could be life on gas giants, even on suns, based on completely different chemical interactions.

              • hector@lemmy.today
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                4 days ago

                Even humble life on it’s moons, living with ammonia in it’s blood or something, as they found on titan. Lakes of methane, with methane rain replete with lightning. Volcanic eruptions of water mixed with ammonia that kept it from freezing and had it in a semi solid molten state at -200 degrees f or whatever it is. From the probe landed there, forget when that was, on titan. But life could exist even there, even if not higher life, they do have liquid bodies. That is the factor for life, the right liquid to gas temperature changes with the right chemical reactions, and the spar of zeus.

        • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
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          4 days ago

          I disagree completely, and I am not a believer in any god. You care about things as a human, but (should a god exist) don’t you think it a step too far to assume a gods experience would be anything at all like our own? Whether it cares or doesn’t may be the wrong question entirely — too anthropic of a question. Even if it did have the human sense of care in its faculty of psychology, something that may entirely be a social construct, then wouldn’t it equally so be arrogant to assume what a creator does/not care about? A creator might care a lot about you, and sees suffering as some kind of tough love… who the hell can say? The universe could be infinite, and that could simply be a preference in design. Who the hell can say?

          God isn’t our enemy, whether or not it exists. Our enemy is the people who claim to speak for god.

          • hector@lemmy.today
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            4 days ago

            What I’m trying to say is I believe in the utterly indifferent god. It likely neither knows nor cares about us. We would go to church about it, but what’s the point?

            We do not have all the answers, and we should accept that, from our position on this speck of dust in the unimaginably larger system we live amongst, we should just embrace that we don’t know everything, despite the experts telling us affirmatively the age and size of the universe as if they could know, or the religious leaders espousing ideas the age of reason has proven to be wrong.

            Part of wisdom is accepting what you don’t, and what you can’t know.

            I don’t really disagree with much of what your responded with however. Creator is a nebulous term. Creating biological machines that evolve to meet their conditions become rather removed from those creators if separated by unimaginable large distances between solar systems. There is no way any being seeding life would survive to watching it evolve over billions of years, even if some form of transport could break the speed of light, which I believe to be impossible.

            • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
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              4 days ago

              Yeah, I’m agreeing with you more now.

              I’ve thought a lot about god and decided that, even if it does exist, my best way to honor it would be to live my life honestly and freely as though it does not exist.

              I’ve considered the argument about the size of the universe, with us being specks of dust in all of that…that perspective does make us seem insignificant, until (IMO) you consider that we humans (as far as we know) are the only species in the whole universe that even tries to worship a god. We’re matter that asks about morals, and it’s possible you might only find that here on Earth. Given, we’re the center of the epistemological universe — not the ontological one.

              I’m not saying that’s necessarily true. I am saying, however, that there are angles which make us more significant even in this big universe.

              Personally, I like to think of God as being the first thing that could move. It very well may be explained as a quirk of quantum mechanics that results in the state of nothing being inherently unstable — allowing for something to arise. We are beings of that something which this mechanic produced, and that’s godly enough (relative to me) for me.

              Again, I’m not saying that’s what god is necessarily. That’s just how I think about it.

    • hector@lemmy.today
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      4 days ago

      They didn’t say that did they? Jesus, yeah, that’s what they are doing, not playing the biggest confidence scam in the world.

  • puppinstuff@lemmy.ca
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    One day soon he’ll run out of companies to eat each other and the creditor bill will come due.

  • Alloi@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    great place to store the expensive child porn generators. far away in space, where a molotov can never reach.

    i fucking hate this timeline.