He's sending the weirdest mixed signals. If we want to hit anywhere near 1 on the Kardashev scale we're gonna need a planet wide high speed rail system. They should just give the major tech companies naming rights to the stations for 35 years for like 2-3 billion a pop and scale up construction 5x.

I don't get the slow roll on this thing. The stations in LA and SF are gonna end up sort of like Tokyo station for the Shinkansen. A giant mall area with a huge amount of commerce. Why isn't this thing done yesterday?

Pinning CAHSR jobs program as hyperloop's fault is pretty funny. Maybe he did intend to upset it but since both turned out to be massive boondoggles doesn't seem like it worked - they managed to delay it themselves just fine.

I don't think he's dumb at all, if what you say is correct. He wanted to block something for his own benefit and he achieved it.

> the California High-speed Rail project

The state government of California was doing a bang up job of destroying this project on their own. He didn't really need to help them. Moreover given the rise of remote work I'm not sure it has as much value as it would have had it been constructed when it was designed.

> but he's not dumb enough to actually believe all the bullshit he spouts.

Yet he's not afraid of the consequences either. This seems more telling to me.

The issue with AI datacenters in orbit is not science or engineering but economics. There is no practical reason why it can't be done, but why would anyone want to buy compute from such a datacenter when they could pay substantially less money for better capacity on Earth?

Orbit is a bad place for a datacenter. Your equipment will be hot and bombarded with radiation. You can't do any repairs. Even with reusable rockets you still have to pay for fuel to launch everything into orbit. You get a small benefit of more efficient power generation but it's not worth all the downsides.

If you want to have solar-powered AI datacenter that you can't service, you'd be way better off building the power generation in a coastal desert and building your datacenter underwater.

With the rockets, it was more, “wow that seems impossible, but incredible if you can pull it off versus existing options.”

With the space data centers, it’s more, “Okay yeah so let’s say you do…why?”

It just seems like a really hard thing to do when the available options are, like, the Chinese building data centers on the Tibetan plateau where it is cold, ample renewable energy, tons of land, and, like, oxygen.