[Tyrubias]

I’m no fan of Elon Musk, but even from a neutral perspective I’m bewildered by the merger between X, X.ai, and SpaceX and now this acquisition of Cursor. What’s the endgame? How does this help with the whole vision of “we all live in space and mine resources from the Moon and have data centers on Mars”?

[danny_codes]

The endgame is to game the index funds by bribing or otherwise.. convincing the big stock exchanges to forgo their index inclusion rules so SpaceX will get included in Nasdaq 100 within 10 days or something stupid like that. SpaceX will initially float a tiny fraction of shares at a wildly inflated value and use a combination of artificial scarcity and Elon Stans (retail) to keep the stock from crashing until it gets included in the indexes. Then, your 401k will auto-buy SpaceX, letting insiders exit at their ludicrous valuation.

Eventually, stock prices will correct hard, and retail/passive investors will be left with the bag.

The idea that merging these companies has some business purpose is hilarious. It’s purely financial engineering. Unfortunately, our existing system has little consumer protection against this kind of fraud, so Elon will probably get away with it, at least in the short term

[JumpCrisscross]

> endgame is to game the index funds

Buying Cursor does nothing for this.

[3eb7988a1663]

It gives them some amount of paying customer base using AI. That is some magic voodoo you need to sprinkle onto the public sale to get the highest possible price point.

[CGMthrowaway]

X doesnt yet have a paying customer base using AI?

[numpad0]

idk but feels like this might be a new literal kind of acquihire, to bulk purchase workers in cash

[fontain]

The Elon Musk Company does what Elon Musk wants. Tesla is dying, X is a disaster, so he bundled everything into the one company that had a bright future, SpaceX. There is no grand vision or endgame beyond do as Elon Musk wants. Going to Mars or the Moon or whatever was never a vision or mission, just a story to tell.

[Rover222]

Model Y is still the best selling car in the world (and still the best-selling car in China), but yeah Tesla is *dying.

[JumpCrisscross]

> What’s the endgame? How does this help with the whole vision of “we all live in space and mine resources from the Moon and have data centers on Mars”?

I put this in the other thread, but my personal working hypothesis is the SpaceX/Musk mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere.

Space-based datacenters are a demand excuse for putting solar panels (and eventually, solar-panel fabrication) in space. Cursor is a demand excuse for building more datacenters (and eventaully, learning to fabricate chips). If I'm correct, the next acquisition will be in some chip or solar-panel fabrication bottleneck.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for this mission. (Though I do think the space-based datacenter pitch has gotten more scepticism than it deserves. For realistic interest-rate and terrestrial-delay values, assuming ongoing AI demand, it breaks even for surprisingly-proximate radiator-mass values. Obviously more problems beyond my toy model to solve. But I expected the math to say fuck you out the gate.)

I'm saying this is a good working theory for explaining–and predicting–Musk and SpaceX's actions. Mars explains why SpaceX's engines burn methane. Dyson sphere explains why xAI is building massive datacenters and now finding acquisition targets to fill them with.

[taurath]

> building a Dyson sphere

So they are trying to take everyone’s money in bigger and bigger chunks until there is no economy left but hype.

Folks, if we spent 1/10th of the time and money we spend on this bullshit on taking care of people’s basic needs and education we would be far closer to the sci-fi future everyone seems so motivated to get to. Covid and the Trump cult seem to have broken almost everyone’s brains and we’re all gonna pay for the hubris.