I don't know where a vengeful future administration would come from. We only have Democrats or Republicans to choose from, and Democrats have made turning the other cheek their entire purpose and political mission. They slow-rolled the investigation of Trump so long he got elected again in the meantime. The idea that any major Democrat would go after a billionaire and not just any billionaire but the biggest billionaire of them all? Absurd thought.

True. There is a “so far” on that.

If shareholders have to pay the debt, then the shares will be less valuable, and Musk (whose wealth is measured in shares) will be less wealthy, no?

> People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space.

The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.

Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show, the "legitimate" bluecheck verification program being all but dead for new applicants. People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.

What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates.

A lot of young people are coming of age with the worst imaginable role models to emulate, from politics to business. This is going to become obvious soon enough, I imagine.

I'm very glad I'm not responsible for raising children these days.

Is that what we're calling allowing CSAM and promoting white supremacist rhetoric?

Doesn't make it a good deal. Just means he can afford to make bad deals.

It just seems highly unlikely the USG would issue a >$44Billion dollar set of fines to anybody.

Not to anyone with basic grasp of what USAID did or was

The results of DOGE

A former USAID global health official has cited internal modeling suggesting around 600,000 excess deaths in 2025 alone, roughly two‑thirds among children, due to the collapse of programs for malnutrition, HIV, TB, obstetric care, and child health.

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

USAID global health and development funding has been cut by on the order of 80–85%, sharply reducing support for vaccination, TB control, maternal health, and other essential services in many poorer countries.

Within CDC, DOGE‑related cuts and mass firings have removed thousands of staff, with specific centers (e.g., National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention) losing over a quarter of their workforce.

Short term: more outbreaks like the Bangladesh measles surge, interrupted treatment for chronic and infectious diseases, and increased mortality where programs were heavily donor‑funded.

Medium term: degradation of global health infrastructure and human capital (loss of trained staff, data systems, and labs), making it harder to recover even if funding later returns.

Long term: slower medical innovation, reduced global surveillance capacity, and entrenched health inequities, as countries and communities with the fewest resources bear the brunt of lost support.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1...

What does “hysterical” mean in this context?

Yeah canceling USAID programs that made the difference between life and death for millions of people around the world. Were you in a coma during DOGE in 2025 or are you being purposely selective in your memory?

Nothing hysterical about killing millions of people, hopefully there becomes a movement in the US to not only try Elon Musk at say the International Criminal Court (which we all know will lead to successful conviction, the evidence is apparent and naked enough as is) but hopefully the US government nationalizes his assets as he is a danger to the world.

Also the US should start throwing some oligarchs in prison to help rehabilitate its image after people start blaming us for causing famines and more deaths due to the recent imperial project that has become a total shit show.

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

"If founding is not restored by 2030, 8 to 10 million people will die."

If Harvard is too woke for you here's a youtube interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ8wm5PTKJg

If Youtube is too woke for you, here's the book detailing this as well:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243105542-into-the-wood-...

If books are woke for you, maybe just go back into your cave where concern trolling is more respected.

So it's a lot less dumb if 50 really difficult and borderline physically impossible things happen. On the word of a conman. Right.

> It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that.

No, it's still dumb.

No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica. If they built in Antarctica, it would still be cheaper than launching into orbit. You'd have lots of free cold air to potentially cool the computers, and you wouldn't need trained astronauts to fix things when things break. I dont' even think that building a datacenter in Antarctica is a good idea, I'm just saying it's less dumb than launching into space.

Even if you make CPUs that are able to work at a hotter temperature, you still have to contend with the fact that space is effectively one giant insulator and these CPUs cannot work at infinitely high temperatures no matter what.

Even for something like Akamai space data centers are a dumb idea. Keep in mind, this would be space, where people can't easily get to, so you'd need considerably more physical servers to be installed in order to have fault tolerance. Even if the servers weighed nothing, which they wouldn't, you'd need to power them, and in order to power that many servers you'd need solar arrays considerably larger than the ISS.

And what exactly would this buy you? Slightly lower latency for Starlink? With a potentially spotty connection, I'm not even convinced on that; I suspect any latency savings you'd have would be eaten by retries when packages drop.

Outside of a neatness factor, I just don't see exactly would be won by doing this compared to just setting up gigantic solar array in the middle of large deserts and building here on earth. You know, the planet we live on, where technicians can go and repair things in datacenters, because servers break all the fucking time, and these technicians don't have to get into a rocket to do that.

It's actually more dumb if you can manage all of the things to make this farce successful, because high-temperature chips that don't require cooling would work even better on Earth than in space because the temperature resistance could be combined with ambient cooling, and there are far more valuable (and longer-lasting) things that could be launched with greater launch mass efficiency.

Also...hardened electronics have been a thing for decades. It's not big because shielding is cheaper and far more effective. The only practical use is military, and there are already DoD suppliers who are generations ahead of SpaceX on the hardened chip front.

I'm not even sure I'm willing to concede he's smart by any definition of the word.

I guess he's good at making shit up and making his investors forget his failed promises? I guess that requires some level of intelligence.