| ▲ | protastus 8 hours ago |
| Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX due to Tesla being a public company, so his hands are tied. Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US. Most people just want affordable, maintainable and reliable cars. |
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| ▲ | cortesoft 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX due to Tesla being a public company, so his hands are tied. He absolutely could do it, just like he did when Tesla bought SolarCity. It just isn’t as easy when one of the companies is public than when both are private. |
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| ▲ | SilverSlash 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've been thinking about this recently as I hear it often. Would people who want to buy a car in the Tesla price range really choose a slightly cheaper Chinese EV if those were available? Personally I have a hard time believing this. But even if you had similarly priced Chinese options, I would guess the main reason for buying a Tesla is not just because you want an EV. While a Tesla will be a reliable baseline EV, surely the reason you (or at least I) would buy one is for the supervised self-driving feature. |
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| ▲ | moeadham 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I’m old enough to remember when this was said about Solar City |
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| ▲ | beambot 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX Bill Ackman has proposed taking SpaceX public by merging it with his Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, distributing 0.5 Special Purpose Acquisition Rights (SPARs) to Tesla shareholders for each share held. Each SPAR would be exercisable for two shares of SpaceX, aimed at enabling a 100% common stock capitalization without traditional underwriting fees or dilutive warrants. With SpaceX IPO set to be one of the biggest of all time, this could have a pretty gnarly financial engineering impact on both companies -- especially if the short interest (direct or through derivatives) remains large. |
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| ▲ | jedberg 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Why would SpaceX go public? They already have a robust enough private market to give liquidity to all of their employees and shareholders who want it. They can get more private investment. Going public would add a lot of hassle for little to no gain (and probably a negative of having to reveal their finances). | | |
| ▲ | spikels 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It has been widely reported for weeks that SpaceX is planning to go public in a few months. The reason is they have big plans to run a vast network of AI servers in orbit and will need to raise a massive amount of funding. xAI merger fits with that plan. I'd assume SpaceX still plans to go public. Was ignored on HN but here's an article explaining: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/after-years-of-resisti... | | |
| ▲ | kevin_thibedeau 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > a vast network of AI servers in orbit That story makes no technical sense. There's no benefit to doing this. Nobody should believe it any more than boots on Mars by 2030. | | | |
| ▲ | airza 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | it wasn't ignored on HN, there were many articles correctly noting that building data centers in space is a stupid stupid idea because cooling things there is infeasible | | |
| ▲ | woah 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Was doing some back of the envelope math with chatGPT so take it with a grain of salt, but it sounds like in ideal conditions a radiator of 1m square could dissipate 300w. If this is the case, then it seems like you could approach a viable solution if putting stuff in space was free. What i can't figure out is how the cost of launch makes sense and what the benefit over building it on the ground could be | | |
| ▲ | spikels 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | What temperature were you assuming? Because the amount of energy radiated varies with the temperature to the fourth power (P=εσT^4). Assuming very good emissivity (ε=0.95) and ~75C (~350K) operating temperature I get 808 W/m2. |
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| ▲ | spikels 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Google, Blue Origin and at least 5 other smaller companies have announced plans to build data centers in space. My understanding is the cooling issue is not the show stopper you assume. | | |
| ▲ | bhadass 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | yup, bezos said "we will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades". presumably this means they'll need huge ass radiators, so its all about bringing down launch costs since they'll need to increase mass. |
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| ▲ | kortex 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | lol WHAT? AI datacenters are bottlenecked by power, bandwidth, cooling, and maintenance. Ok sure maybe the Sun provides ample power, but if you are in LEO, you still have to deal with Earth's shadow, which means batteries, which means weight. Bandwidth you have via starlink, fine. But cooling in space is not trivial. And maintenance is out, unless they are also planning some kooky docking astromech satellite repair robot ecosystem. Maybe the Olney's lesions are starting to take their toll. Weirdest freaking timeline. | | |
| ▲ | crote 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The shadow thing can be solved by using a sun-synchronous orbit. See for example the TRACE solar observation satellite, which used a dawn/dusk orbit to maintain a constant view of the sun. Cooling, on the other hand? No way in hell. | | |
| ▲ | clausz 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Every telco satellite can cool its electronics. However, more than a few kW is difficult. The ISS has around 100kW and is huge and in a shadow half the time. | |
| ▲ | SJC_Hacker 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Cooling, on the other hand? No way in hell. Space is actually really cold when the sun is blocked So, solar panels on side, GPUs on the other, maybe with a big ass radiator ... | | | |
| ▲ | giancarlostoro 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The cooling is the bit where I'm lost on, but it will be interesting to see what they pull off. It feels like everyone forgets Elon hires very smart people to work on these problems, it's not all figured out by Elon Musk solely. | | |
| ▲ | spikels 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Google, Blue Origin and a bunch of other companies have announced plans for data centers in space. I don't think cooling is the showstopper some assume. | | |
| ▲ | giancarlostoro 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Good call out, and really interesting. SpaceX being the cheapest way to get things into space, it seems like SpaceX is about to become extremely lucrative. |
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| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | rhetocj23 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | clhodapp 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| He's broken pretty much all the other financial rules.... for example, the amount of blatant self-dealing he gets away with is staggering. As long as the consequences of his actions continue to increase the paper value for investors, regulations don't really have teeth because there aren't damages. So the snowball gets bigger and the process repeats. |
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| ▲ | DoesntMatter22 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Did you see how this last quarter where BYD sales fell off a cliff? |
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| ▲ | w4der 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| BYD are just affordable and maybe reliable, regarding maintenance their spares are hard to come by and are almost as hard to work with as Tesla and other brands. |
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| ▲ | bdamm 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I've done plenty of work on my own Tesla. It's not hard to work on at all. Parts are not even very difficult. There are plenty of 3rd party shops (such as one I went to when I needed to replace my windshield.) I really wonder why people continue to think this. It's not 2016 any more. | | |
| ▲ | protastus 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Tesla body work is extremely expensive. Aluminum, extensive welding instead of fasteners, substantially reduced modularity due to castings, specialized tooling just off the top of my mind. |
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| ▲ | vonneumannstan 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are you a car mechanic living in China? | | |
| ▲ | piker 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Presumably "hard to come by" would be somewhat irrelevant in any jurisdiction other than the US? |
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| ▲ | estearum 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [Nearly] all is possible when you have a board of simps/cultists |
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| ▲ | jaco6 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [dead] |
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| ▲ | xeromal 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's "ironic?" considering Tesla launching in China is what created the necessary supply chain to turn BYD into the powerhouse it is today. Tesla's greed will become their own demise. |
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| ▲ | dmix 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Tesla cars made in Shanghai are sold in Europe and other places. That is helping them be competitive and they haven't had much price pressure until recently. Just because the Chinese have their own internal competition and deflation which drove their prices down aggressively doesn't mean it was a bad idea to build there. Also the idea the Chinese couldn't figure it out without an American company coming there first to show them is pretty silly. Tesla Shanghai opened in 2019 BYD made their first hybrid in 2008 and they were a battery company since the 90s |
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