Peak Musk...
...is past. Now well on the way to jumping the shark.
Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'
Elon Musk has put Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI in harness to build a chip fabrication outfit called "Terafab" capable of producing a terawatt's worth of computing power each year, then send most of it into space. In a Sunday afternoon presentation, Musk said the world's chipmakers currently produce 20 gigawatts' worth of compute …
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Monday 23rd March 2026 07:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Peak Musk...
“ The reason for doing this, Musk said, is to ensure humans find a home among the stars and a future that will be “like the best science fiction you have ever read. Like Star Trek, Iain Banks, Asimov, or Heinlein.”
Seems fine to me Asimov/Foundation where Robots and AI are banned. Star Trek where Robot/Sentient life was banned.
AI will lead to the Downfall of Mankind, and I don’t believe we will ever escape this Solar System - even with Musk’s ‘New Physics’.. Akin to The Expanse.
My Protected Philosophical Beliefs.
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Wednesday 25th March 2026 01:23 GMT cyberdemon
Re: As long as we get Servelan...
She's a saucy minx that Servalan.. No other galactic supervillain would get as personally involved in her job as she does.
Been watching Blake's 7 recently and it is incredibly good. Not so impressed with that Tarrant twit in the later episodes, but the set design makes up for it.
And they always end up saving Servalan. I would, too.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 07:54 GMT simonlb
Re: Peak Musk...
Perhaps I missed it, but I only remember the BBC ever broadcasting it once when it originally came out when I was a kid. I'm also currently going through the DVD box set for all 4 seasons, and season 4 has gone all camp and space opera like, with everyone overacting in each scene, which is a shame.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 08:14 GMT Alan J. Wylie
Re: Peak Musk...
Like Star Trek, Iain Banks, Asimov, or Heinlein
More likely, Frank Herbert's Butlerian Jihad: Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
P.S., is the phrase "a rack packed full of high-end AI fear" an apposite typo?
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Monday 23rd March 2026 08:49 GMT LogicGate
Re: Peak Musk...
"a future that will be “like the best science fiction you have ever read. Like .... Heinlein.”
-He wants the Moon to become a privately run penal colony.
-He wants the united states to fall apart into a bunch of facist and populist dictatorships where genetically enhanced humans are used as slaves.
1984 was a warning, not a set of instructions!
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Monday 23rd March 2026 11:03 GMT You aint sin me, roit
Re: Peak Musk...
I think before we get to a Butlerian Jihad there will be "issues" when people realize that more resources are being put into powering those 10 billion robots than feeding the human population.
People go hungry so Musk can have his robot army. And remember, that's one reason why he wants control of Tesla: "If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence... I don't feel comfortable... if I don't have that".
As if anyone would feel "comfortable" with Musk in control of a robot army...
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 19:22 GMT Michael Strorm
Re: Peak Musk...
> "People go hungry so Musk can have his robot army"
I've said this before, but it's *odd* that the man who thinks it's supposedly so crucial for man's future that we invest in getting away from earth even at the expense of anything resembling social justice and condemning billions to a squalor-like existence is someone who was born into a highly-privileged background, who has never known what it is to be remotely poor, almost certainly will never be so before he dies and who- therefore- will never suffer the consequences of this decision he's nevertheless keen to inflict upon countless others.
Musk has masqueraded as a visionary for too long, when all he really ever was is someone interested in indulging himself and his rich-boy fantasies- a stunted manchild who never had to grow up and "whose only social education [was] the funky sci-fi books [he] read whilst growing up". (*)
And now increasingly exposed as the outright lying bullshitter it's clear he always was.
(*) Thank you for this one, "Andy 73".
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Monday 23rd March 2026 10:17 GMT Like a badger
Re: Peak Musk...
Since when was Star Trek "the best science fiction you have ever read"? It's always been moderately entertaining sci-fi drivel.
And it was Iain M Banks writing science fiction. He was quite particular about the distinction between Iain Banks and Iain M Banks, so perhaps the mush-brained fascist needs to pay more attention.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 19:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Peak Musk...
Despite having been a hero for so many "weird nerds" Musk is not, and has never been, noted for being anything close to skilled- let alone an expert- in *any* particular scientific area.
Musk may be a sci-fi fan, but so fucking what? As one Register forum poster noted, he's one of those whose only social education is the funky sci-fi books they read whilst growing up, trying to deal with the "big questions" that you're suddenly faced with when the day to day distractions of paying the mortgage have gone away.
Any remaining idea that Musk is a nerd/geek hero should have disappeared with his self-serving vandalism on science he perpetrated last year on behalf of DOGE. But, then again, like Musk, many nerds are in a similar position and confuse having geeky obsessions with actual scientific literacy- something that was frequently exposed on (e.g.) Slashdot when the discussion veered outside the tech/IT comfort zone into a story about serious physics and all they had to contribute were lame jokes.
So, then again, one can see why fake science bullshitter Musk *was* a hero to many. Not sure if he still is.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 10:18 GMT Albert Coates
Re: Peak Musk...
Iain Banks just writes novels. The science fiction author is Iain M. Banks, and his 'Culture' space operas are full of violence, vicious intrigue and horrendous cruelty. No thanks, Elon, lay off the ketamine, and I hope you're not the one being decapitated by a knife missile disguised as a dildo (see 'Matter'.)
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Monday 23rd March 2026 15:44 GMT Martin an gof
Re: Peak Musk...
Iain Banks just writes novels
Apologies for breaking it to you if you didn't know, but Iain Banks doesn't write novels any more.
M.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 10:51 GMT cyberdemon
A Terawatt of compute.. In Space.
One Million Megawatts. That's a million satellites with solar arrays a square kilometer each.
If he is allowed to try (and inevitably fail) this flagrantly infeasible idea, then yes it matters. This is a very resource-intensive, pollution-intensive, and obviously capital-intensive folly. In order to try (and fail) he would have to borrow from the same banks that I would rather like to be able to borrow a house from, or invest my pension with.
Frankly, it is time that "The PayPal Mafia" and the other tech twats were put in the stocks for the people to throw rotten eggs at
Otherwise, we are looking at a financial crash to make the Great Depression look like a blip
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 09:14 GMT Persona
Re: A correction
Thank you for the correction. I had looked at your post and done the basic maths to see what was wrong before seeing it. It's surprising that you got so many upvotes for a headline that was so obviously wrong.
One million megawatts from one million satellites would be one megawatt per satellite. An area of a square kilometer each is million square meters each.
One megawatt from one million square meters means they would be delivering a measly one watt per square meter.
This coincidently is about the power density you get out around the orbit of Pluto.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 15:58 GMT TheMaskedMan
Re: A Terawatt of compute.. In Space.
"If he is allowed to try (and inevitably fail) this flagrantly infeasible idea, then yes it matters."
Allowed? By whom? There isn't all that much legislation to govern what an individual might do in - or beyond - earth orbit.
Which, I suspect, is what is really driving Elon. Yes, nutty though he is, it's quite true that we should be expanding out into space. It doesn't do to keep all your eggs in one basket. But his more immediate concern is to get beyond regulations, to be beyond the jurisdiction of any terrestrial government.
Which, again, is understandable. A few hundred years ago, if you didnt like your country / government, you just boarded a ship and went looking for somewhere else to live. That's not so easy now, and the next logical alternative is to move off world. That's what is driving his Mars obsession. It's not an option for most people, but it's different for the super rich.
As for his latest blatherings, well, what can we say? All sounds a bit far fetched to me, but that's not to say that he will fall completely. Popcorn time!
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Monday 23rd March 2026 17:24 GMT cyberdemon
Re: A Terawatt of compute.. In Space.
> Allowed? By whom?
By the banks, investors, bondholders. If they won't lend him the money then he can't do it. He doesn't have enough funny-money to do it purely out of his own pocket.
And the FCC apparently have some power to stop him.
And there are locals already suing him for the pollution to the town nearby his so-called spaceport (in the Panorama that I linked). If he were to increase that pollution a thousand fold with this project, then it wouldn't just be the locals suing him, it'd be the state.
> Yes, nutty though he is, it's quite true that we should be expanding out into space.
Putting a million large sattelites into low earth orbit is not "expanding into space". It actively prevents that with a cloud of space-junk in orbit.. Ten years ago he said he was going to Mars, then he revised that to the Moon, now it seems he's just taking a big dump on the front porch.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 19:50 GMT Michael Strorm
Re: A Terawatt of compute.. In Space.
> "Yes, nutty though he is, it's quite true that we should be expanding out into space. It doesn't do to keep all your eggs in one basket."
Musk would rather reallocate the money spent on social justice and keeping billions out of squalor on his ill-thought-out plans for space exploration on that basis. As I- coincidentally- already said elsewhere in this thread, one suspects that it's easy for him to say that given he was born into privilege, has never known what it is to be poor, almost certainly never will before he dies and won't suffer the consequences of that decision he's willing to inflict upon others.
I say "ill-thought-out" because I don't think Musk gets *quite* how difficult and expensive even the most basic level of space exploration to other worlds is likely to be. This is the man who, around a decade ago, promised crewed missions to Mars in just a few years with ever-changing forecast dates as we reach and pass the previous ones.
> "That's what is driving his Mars obsession. It's not an option for most people, but it's different for the super rich."
From this post by "Andy 73":-
So it's perhaps not unexpected that [the super-rich tech bros'] attention shifts from the "small things" to "big issues". Humans like to have something to worry about, and if it's not that your neighbour's trees are blocking your light, it has to be something else.
In these cases, having been told that they are influencers, leaders of men, powerful people, the worries become grander. Yet even Zuckerberg cannot stop the next pandemic, or mass social unrest. And before long, they're worrying each other about "the event", they're trying to fix society with cack-handed cod psychology like accelerationism or they're speed running government corruption. Especially in the tech world, here are a bunch of guys who's only social education is the funky sci-fi books they read whilst growing up, trying to deal with the "big questions" that you're suddenly faced with when the day to day distractions of paying the mortgage have gone away.
The part in bold, in particular, is Musk all over.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 15:38 GMT cyberdemon
Re: A Terawatt of compute.. In Space.
Indeed. I noticed shortly after posting, but too late to edit, so I posted a correction. It's a few posts above this one with the same icon.
FWIW, some of the proposed designs have up to 16 square kilometre arrays.
I don't know what's more absurd - a million 1MW satellites, a thousand 1GW satellites, or a hundred odd of these monstrosities
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Monday 23rd March 2026 06:59 GMT Joe W
Yeah.... right...
I always wonder if he is smoking some weird shit, or if he does this to boost share prices, or likes the media attention.
"New physics". Right. And what kind of physics? 2nm on a large scale, without any prior experience? Terrawatt computing in space without a way to vent off all that heat?
This is just another bloody stupid idea, and I guess by writing that comment I give him the attention he wants. Look at the Hyperloop, full self driving "this year for realz", Cybertruck (at least this one does indeed exist), the stupid submarine thingy, ...
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Monday 23rd March 2026 07:21 GMT simonlb
Re: Yeah.... right...
“confident will work. It's just a question of when.”
Finally, the words he has never once uttered in all his bullshit bingo talks over the years - "Just a question of when." This is why there are no
monorailshyperloops in existence, because although technically feasible, our current level of power generation and the materials science needed are not at a large enough scale to build them. He wasn't lying about it, we just can't do it yet. But by the time we do have that level of technology available to do it, we will already have built the next generation of high-speed trains and supersonic aircraft so the hyperloop will not be needed.And 135 Starship launches a day? Well at least a couple of them might finally get to orbit instead of having a dip in the Indian Ocean, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
No, as with anything with this guy, if he's 'confident' it can be done, you can guarantee it will always be
in about two yearspossibly before the heat death of the universe. Probably.-
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Monday 23rd March 2026 11:17 GMT Oneman2Many
Re: Yeah.... right...
They have experience of heat venting both on Dragon and Starlink so I give them the benefit of doubt that they can manage heat.
However the plan on works with rail gun launch from lunar surface. The same lunar surface were there is still doubt about how much water there is plus nothing has ever been manufactured in the extremely hostile environment.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 00:28 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: Yeah.... right...
Scot Manley put a YouTube video up over the weekend about venting heat, and doing the back-of-the-envelope calculations. Apparently it's possible.
I'm still sceptical, however.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 10:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Yeah.... right...
I’m curious how they are going to vent heat with no fucking atmosphere for heat exchange?? Because space is a near-vacuum, there are no particles to conduct or convect heat, meaning temperature is felt primarily through radiation in or out:
Radiation will only get you so far.
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Sunday 5th April 2026 22:29 GMT Mimsey Borogove
Re: Yeah.... right...
Terrawatt computing in space without a way to vent off all that heat?
I've been trying to figure out whether space would be a better place for datacenters, with my very limited knowledge of both space and physics. One of my main objections to them is the tremendous amount of power and water needed on earth, but would those be problems in space? I'm thinking a large solar array for power, and the array itself could act as a heat shield for the computers. Being out of the sun, space itself could cool them - right?
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Monday 23rd March 2026 09:36 GMT Steve Davies 3
"Built a Fab"?
Has he really built one or is it a pipe dream?
Modern Fabs (the sort that can make 2nm wafers) take years to build and start operating. Ask Intel or TSMC about that. For his lordship Elon the 1st of Texas, to have built a fab in Austin very much off the radar is slightly suspicious. Could this as alluded to by some respondents be a [cough][cough] bit of pure Fabrication on his part that may or may not have been helped by possibly illegal substances?
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Monday 23rd March 2026 10:07 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: "Built a Fab"?
Presumably the "play" to draw investors in is to suggest that lithography and etching are the problem and that it can all be done with 3-D printing – this might be possible at some scales, and then you start looking at the accuracy you can achieve using mechanical processes, versus those using lasers… I can sort of imagine using lasers in some way "dropping" atoms onto a substrate in a way that is already done when doping…
I've no doubt improvements are possible – and we may see that the Chinese manufacturers come up with some process improvements to compensate the resolution at which they operate – but the chip industry hasn't got to the concentration it has because TSMC and ASML are using anti-competitive practices to prevent all competition, but because the physics (and chemistry) at this resolution is bloody difficult. This has lead to specialisation at every step of the supply chain, but competition remains fierce.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 12:27 GMT Oneman2Many
Re: "Built a Fab"?
TSMC and ASML aren't using anti-competitive practices. They are protecting they IP which isn't surprising as they spent $100bn so far. Huawei is looking at using existing deep ultraviolet lithography as they don't have access to extreme ultraviolet but looking at the article below I don't see how they can apply it to 2nm
https://www.huaweicentral.com/huaweis-2nm-chip-patent-7-things-you-should-know/
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 04:48 GMT Eric 9001
Re: "Built a Fab"?
The very concept of Imaginary Property is anti-competitive.
Patents can only be described as legalized extortion and anti-competition (as a business can still be sued and extorted even when such business implemented the invention before the patent was granted to the patent aggressor).
They claim to have spent $100bn, but TSMC reports an annual revenue in excess of 100 billion USD/year and ASML reports an annual revenue in excess of 30 billion USD/year.
https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/tsm/revenue/
https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/asml/revenue/
Their investments appears to have paid off already, therefore that is not a valid argument as to why they "deserve" to be able be anti-competitive - the shareholders possibly having a dividend that might be slightly smaller if there is competition, is not a valid argument either.
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Wednesday 25th March 2026 05:20 GMT Eric 9001
Re: "Built a Fab"?
~$100bn revenue over several years means you will have covered R&D costs if you're not totally hopeless at business.
In countries with a first to file patent system, you can be sued even if you published prior art prior art prior to the patent being filed, as the extortionist has the patent and you don't; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_invent?useskin=monobook#US_change_to_first-inventor-to-file_(FITF)
Typically what happens is a big business goes to extort a smaller business and if the smaller businesses goes through the patents and determines that many or all are not applicable (or they have solid, published prior art) - the big business just threatens to go back and get more and therefore the smaller business typically chooses to be extorted at the lower settlement rate, rather than the higher extortion rate of legal costs.
Even in a country with first to invent and a solid published prior art, the extortion amount is typically adjusted to be less than the expenses of a legal defense.
The only business who wins when it comes to patents, is big businesses like IBM, as if any business that actually produces something tries to extort IBM, IBM goes; "Cute, but we got this one and this one and this one and that one that applies to your business - why don't we cross license?" and IBM gets more patents and the other business gets patents it can't use to extort.
But such tactic doesn't work against patent trolls that produce nothing and only do patent litigation - who managed in the past to actually extort IBM for example - but IBM just wrote it off as a cost of doing business - but they've now joined the LOT Network to fix that problem.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 14:25 GMT Alan J. Wylie
Re: "Built a Fab"?
I can sort of imagine using lasers in some way "dropping" atoms onto a substrate in a way that is already done when doping
Molecular-beam epitaxy perhaps?
A friend of mine used to do this at Heriot-Watt before he retired. Have a look at some of the images on-line for stainless steel flange porn.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 11:34 GMT that one in the corner
Re: So....
You have to give the Elonophiles some more time: they are currently unable to type, still exhausted and quivering from the multiple Muskasms they had whilst reading the claims. When they've caught their breath, they'll watch a few YouTube replays to extend the afterglow.
And then, *then* they'll come at us with all the might of the downvote!
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Monday 23rd March 2026 09:43 GMT S4qFBxkFFg
I've written off Mush as a delusional nutter many times (the first being back in the early 2010s when he was burning parts of Texas, trying to get a rocket landing tail-first: doesn't this idiot realise how much delta-v he's wasting on a no-glide boost-back burn?, trying to make a desirable electric car, Twitter debacle, etc.), but he has an annoying habit of being right, if never to the extent he advertises.
As an aside, I do hope he's referring to the Iain M. Banks novels, not the ones for which the author dropped the 'M'.
(edit: didn't mean to type "Mush", but it can stay)
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Monday 23rd March 2026 09:57 GMT SnailFerrous
And the Iain M Banks, with the M novels were mostly about a galaxy spanning, egalitarian, anarcho-communist society. Not something you'd think a techno feudalist overlord would approve of. Silicon Valley tech bros never seem to properly read their scifi inspiration beyond the kapow space battles.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 19:59 GMT Michael Strorm
> "Silicon Valley tech bros never seem to properly read their scifi inspiration beyond the kapow space battles."
Musk is a fucking white supremacist one of whose favourite books is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Which was written by a man with an "End Apartheid" sticker on his typewriter.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 15:00 GMT that one in the corner
> ventures that others didn't see any opportunity in
Others have always seen opportunity in the two things that actually work from Musk's empire[1]:
Tesla was a going concern before Musk - and electric cars were well on the map from other manufacturers, as shown by the fact that electric cars have been around since the dawn of motor vehicles. Although advances in related tech, including, IT, were important in moving from the mere daily use of electric vehicles in the 1930s on to meeting the speed requirements of the travelling salesman: the desire and eye to the opportunity were always there - held back mainly because of the lobbying by the internal combustion guys.
Reusable rocketry - it wasn't moving as fast as we'd've liked, with things like the cancellation of the DC-X Delta Clipper. Although advances in related tech, including IT, were important in allowing engineers to move on from a test item to fully working vehicles. As even the Wikipedia the timeline shows, there has been a pretty much continual interest in private companies in space operations, including launch.
> But he's also been proved wrong on several occasions.
That gives us two (count them, two[1, again]) times he has continued - admittedly, with a certain "flair" - to get other people to fund things that were ripe opportunities that the relevant private industries were already well aware of. Now, those have grown in size and popular exposure, but the count is still two.
Now, how about things where, in fact, (except a certain breed of, what is the word - charlatans) "others didn't see any opportunity": hyperloop, boring holes for even more roads, solar panel shingles, flame throwers amongst them. Plus the "opportunities" that he "spotted" for his actually functional companies to work on: Cybertruck, the battery-powered big rig (what am I forgetting here?).
We all expect things like VC funding to have hits and misses - and if Musk restricted himself to claiming to be a VC we'd probably cut him some more slack. But so far the rate of spotting successful opportunities that others missed - and making them work - seems to be very close to zero. Getting funding for opportunities that others were all too aware off and speeding them up, okay, granted.
> more accurately, his engineers have achieved
Very true.
[1] No, not counting PayPal, for obvious reasons.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 16:02 GMT Martin an gof
solar panel shingles
They've been around for decades, or at least, the sort which can replace roof tiles has. I suppose replacing a thin layer of bitumen felt with a chunky solar module might cause issues on a roof that wasn't designed to take much weight.
Link to a company a mate works for. They supply solar slates.
M.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 23:57 GMT Martin an gof
Solar tiles don't weight much more than slate.
Which is sort of the point I was making. On this side of the pond we tend to build roofs to last. Not uncommon to see 150 year old terraces in former mining villages still wearing substantially the same Welsh slate roof they were built with – ditto red fired clay tiles in Itaiy, half-inch thick stone shingles in Scotland and so on. Modern cheap interlocking cement roof tiles should be good for well over 50 years and likely much longer with some basic maintenance.
Heck, even a reed-thatched roof in Norfolk has a life of 50 years or more.
In large parts of the US, and I'm sure there are good reasons, a roof is boarded with OSB or plywood and the waterproof layer is bitumen felt – rolls, sheets, strips or shingles – much the same as we might use on the garden shed, and with an expected life of 10 to 20 years.
Bitumen felt weighs next to nothing compared with even the highest tech solar panels which is why I was wondering if US roofs were up to the task. If it works though, then with useful working lives of 20 – 30 years, solar shingles might outlast a typical residential roof, stateside!
M.
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Wednesday 25th March 2026 14:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
"an expected life of 10 to 20 years."
For bitumen roof? That's a crap roof then, absolute shit.
We've just replaced similar roof of our summer cottage and we installed it in 1963. Not only that, here in North we've actual winter every year, snow and all.
It had some patches to fix the holes made by branches dropping from trees (pine does that), but no leaks until 2022. 60+ years old at that point and that's more or less normal, nothing exceptional.
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Wednesday 25th March 2026 14:29 GMT Tuomas Hosia
"solar shingles might outlast a typical residential roof, stateside!"
Only if you assume typical roof lasts 10 years, which is absolutely absurd assumption. Try 50 years for *any* proper roof.
Even the shingles roof we had in the old times, lasted 25 to 35 years and those were just wood, no treatment whatsoever.
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Saturday 28th March 2026 22:24 GMT Martin an gof
Wood shingles are another thing altogether and the right wood, properly maintained is pretty good.
But US roofs were a big story a while back, with insurance companies refusing to insure roofs more than 15 years old even if designed to last 30 (just one example).
It even made headlines in this august publication though with a slightly different emphasis.
It stuck in my head because a lot of the stories considered 30 years really good for a roof.
The house I mostly grew up in was built in 1967 and not terribly well built at that, but in the 40-odd years I knew that house (we moved in in 1973) as far as I remember, the only problems with the roof were not problems with the roof at all; the guttering needed attention some time in the 1980s and the chimney was re-pointed in the 1990s.
M.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 22:59 GMT that one in the corner
> Link to ...
Which only makes Musk's inability to get anywhere with his tiles all the more impressively bad!
IIRC he was making some wild claims about how the roof plates were going to be manufactured; typically overblown, in the end he had to scratch his shingles*
* not usually recommended
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Monday 23rd March 2026 20:08 GMT DS999
What has he been right about?
Yes he was the first to reach economies of scale in EV production - thanks to huge government subsidies, and he was at one point a month away from going bankrupt according to himself. This wasn't a huge technical achievement or doing something no one thought could be done - it just required someone willing and able to burn cash for long enough to reach that point. A lot of it was due to technology improvement he had nothing to do with - that's why there are now dozens of EV players in China and elsewhere, many of whom are delivering EVs costing far less than his.
Yes he was the first to deliver commercial reusable rockets. Tail landing had been done before so everyone knew it was possible but again making it commercially successful required someone willing and able to burn cash getting there. Had NASA made that a priority for their contracts we'd likely have had it a long time ago, but they don't do enough launches a year that it was worth it to them to develop that tech when they had other places to direct their budget. Having cheap launch technology made Starlink possible - it has zero new tech, and is better the alternatives simply because of the number of LEO satellites he's been able to launch - and again, being willing and able to burn cash getting it to the point where it could sustain itself going forward.
I'm struggling to think of anything else he was "annoyingly right" about? He's got a long list of failed promises for his self driving tech, and it is falling further and further behind the state of the art (he's no longer in the top 10 purveyors of that tech since he's getting lapped by others despite his huge head start) Despite the recent splashy articles about his trucks, he was late to that party as there have been electric trucks and self driving electric trucks on the road for several years while his was constantly promised and falling further and further behind schedule.
Everything he's promised that's truly futuristic has completely failed to materialize. Hyperloop? That sounded like a fantasy when he announced it, and it was. The only "operating" one is running Teslas in a tunnel. That was possible with tech almost 200 years ago, we knew how to dig tunnels then and steam engines above ground could have pulled cables attached to train cars in those tunnels. Might be a bit quieter and safer/cheaper to dig the tunnel, but it is not an advance worthy of the wild claims he originally made about tunnels hundreds of miles long and speeds exceeding Mach 1 lol
The idea he can build a fab himself AT ALL when even Intel and Samsung struggle to keep up with TSMC is pretty fanciful. The idea he can do it on a scale 50x greater than everyone in the world, or that there is a market for that level of capacity is even more ridiculous. He won't be annoyingly right about this, he'll be laughably wrong. Everyone here knows it, and even his fanboys who usually pipe up to defend him against criticism are staying silent because even they don't believe him on this!
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 11:24 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: What has he been right about?
I'm prepared to give him credit for choosing to invest in both Tesla and Space X at a time when most investors were interested solely in software and "platforms" that could scale massively. He certainly brought management nous to the companies: buying the Toyota factory in order to be able to make cars at scale. I'm less of a fan of the debt-financing, but it was what everyone else was using.
He should be given credit for helping/letting Space X set goals that it eventually achieved. The NASA contract reduced the financial risk somewhat, but Musk was personally responsible for much of the financing and he stuck with it even when it looked like might not work.
But things like Solarcity should have alerted investors to the potential downsides of giving him so much power to do whatever he wanted. Tesla fell into an innovation pit as development halted in order to juice returns. It hasn't really recovered from this, which is why it's being rolled in with Twitter and Space X to muddy the waters before an IPO that will let him build robots nobody needs.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 20:09 GMT DS999
Re: What has he been right about?
I'm prepared to give him credit for choosing to invest in both Tesla and Space X at a time when most investors were interested solely in...
So you're giving him credit for being a risk taker. OK, fair enough, he could have sat on the pile he got pile by Paypal to go away because he was so annoying and lived a life of luxury, but he's hardly alone there.
He also took some pretty small risk technology wise with Tesla and SpaceX. No basic technology that didn't exist had to be invented for either one, nor was the proposed scale of each wildly out of proportion with what was already out there.
That was not true with Hyperloop, which required a LOT of new technology to be invented from scratch to deliver on his initial wild promises that he quickly forgot. That goes double for his terafab, which not only requires new technology to meet his claimed goal of making chips without a cleanroom but is also ridiculous on its scale being 50x larger or whatever it is than current worldwide chip output. Even if there was demand for that you'd run into materials shortages to the point where you'd need to find a lot of new sources of raw materials or develop new techniques to exploit places (like the ocean) where they may exist but are currently completely infeasible.
He's so far off the rails now that he's discontinuing some models of Tesla because he wants to repurpose the factory to make robots. Despite no proof he can actually make a robot that does anything useful, and that there is a market for enough of them that justifies shutting down car production to go all in on robots. He'd only finally reached breakeven without subsidy for cars but first he crated his reputation by going full Nazi now he's making huge cuts to production (though maybe one has to do with the other...) so Tesla is going to go back to losing money on cars, and add losing money on robots.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 12:29 GMT Flocke Kroes
New Physics
I am afraid "new physics" is actually a thing. The current generation can be recognised by the total absence of anything explaining what it is.
The previous generation actually came with a PDF. The first page would be about the conspiracy of established physicists rejecting the proposition out of jealousy. The next page would have some complicated mathematics copied from a 100 year old text book. The appearance of mathematics changes over the years as the language becomes more concise and expressive. The page will be quite correct, utterly irrelevant and difficult for anyone under 60 years old to recognise. The next 98 pages are mechanically generated - not travesty generator output like a man from mars. The last one I read had complex output from molecular modelling software. It was probably quite correct (IANAChemist) but each page took over two minutes to render making it impractical to read the entire document.
Early attempts at new physics did include an explanation. The problem was these were quickly debunked either because of a flaw in the mathematics (all triangles are isoscales) or because the theory predicted the wrong results for simple experiments.
The purpose of new physics is to get investment from people with more money than sense. I doubt Musk has the brains to do it directly. More likely he has fallen for the prattle of a skilled new physicist and is repeating the words to Tesla shareholders. At this rate SpaceX's IPO will reach orbit before Starship.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 11:46 GMT Naich
"Musk challenged doubters by pointing out Tesla and SpaceX defied critics who predicted electric cars and reusable rockets would not be feasible or economical."
Reusable rockets were around in the early 80s, and electric cars have been around for ever. I guess we wouldn't know these critics because they go to a different school.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 14:36 GMT Alan J. Wylie
Re: RE: "I want to live long enough to see the mass driver on the Moon," the 54-year-old said.
It's been a while since I read /The Moon is a Harsh Mistress/, but isn't there a quote in it where the AI says something like "shall I stop hurling steel encased rocks at Cheyenne Mountain, because it isn't there anymore?"
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Monday 23rd March 2026 15:47 GMT that one in the corner
Re: RE: "I want to live long enough to see the mass driver on the Moon," the 54-year-old said.
He can spend 20 years building the mass driver on the Moon, then use it to shoot himself, and a big parachute, to Mars.
With a couple of litres (sorry, sorry, pints) of water in his suit he can survive the landing and walk around for a bit, before shrivelling up, spending his last hour shouting to the heavens that his Tesla-branded Magnetosphere *will* work by 2051.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 16:04 GMT Taliesinawen
DOGE uncovered massive fraud
> Might that have been a reference to his chaotic and unproductive time at the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency?
DOGE was sabotaged by vested interests. For instance the (USIP) copied computer files off site and then erased them locally to prevent audit. That's why DOGE couldn't trace where the money went that was allocated to all those dead people ;)
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Monday 23rd March 2026 16:35 GMT Flocke Kroes
Re: DOGE massive fraud
Trump's executive order concerning USIP have been ruled illegal. The complete roll back of OMB's illegal actions is currently stayed awaiting appeal.
Thank you for pointing out yet more criminal activity from the Trump regime. Has the rising cost of Iranian fertiliser reached your groceries yet?
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Monday 23rd March 2026 23:42 GMT that one in the corner
Re: "terawatt's worth of computing power"
Does anyone know how much power the replica Babbage engines require? Are any El Reg readers working at one of the museums that own an engine?
After all, if you are looking for a design able to withstand the radiation in space, you could do a lot worse than all that lovely brass.
We'd probably end up using William Gibson's measure of computing power, the gear-mile; efficiency in horses required per gear-mile, a measure colloquially known as the Hansom.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 08:53 GMT robinsonb5
Re: "terawatt's worth of computing power"
Given what the datacentre build-out is going to do to demand and pricing for both energy and water, and the hardships that will cause for regular people, we really *really* need power usage to be considered a negative metric, not a postive one.
Here's a radical solution: ban active cooling!
OK I'm joking, I know it'll never happen - but the current approach to datacentres is the exact opposite of "treading lightly upon the earth", and a radical shift is desperately needed.
[ On the subject of water usage: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/ ]
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Friday 27th March 2026 13:53 GMT Bbuckley
Honestly - to both the article writer and the 'armchair generals' who think they have something useful to say in the comments - Elon Musk *revolutionised* space exploration, not only with the first ever reusable Falcon rocket, but is, in *real-time*, as we speak, reinventing the actual future of the Human race with SpaceX Starship, I say to you - *losers!*. Idiots. You really are like the chimps in 2001, A Space Odyssey, totally confused and ignorant about what it is you are looking at.
