* Honestly, if you don't look at X, you are underinformed as to what an awful, awful person he is. (And you don't need to follow his account - he'll make sure you see his deep thoughts anyway.)
* As he has many times before, his grandiose plans seem to suddenly be set aside, or re-arranged massively, with his priorities now said to be to build a city on the Moon instead of Mars. Now, while I have suggested at this very blog for the last 20 years (!) that the Moon could indeed serve a "lifeboat" function to recover from planetary disasters that could strike the Earth, I suppose I should be grateful that the richest man on the planet's priorities now align at least closer to mine. But - he's still obviously over-promising to give a thrill to his followers: it won't be anything like a "city" on the Moon for (I would guess) another century or more. And it doesn't need to be. It will be more like Antarctic research station(s), perhaps a few in different locations: but no one's going to be calling them "cities". And it will indeed be an interesting time while the surface gets explored up close, in sufficient detail, as to work out the best sites for long term, permanent outposts. Confirming water near the poles, and/or structurally solid lava tubes, will be quite exciting for those of us keen to see people (or robots) doing useful stuff on the Moon. We could have been doing this already if NASA and Musk didn't continually muck around with their priorities.
* Of course, perhaps in compensation for pulling back on Mars, Musk decided to go over the top in another proposal - that he'll go all in on data centres in orbit. Again, I've seen stupid gaga followers immediately endorse the idea as if "of course it will work, he's a brilliant visionary". But count me firmly on the side of "this is never going to happen, to any significant extent, in this century, if ever" corner, because it fundamentally doesn't make any sense. I mean, even O'Neill with his grandiose solar power arrays to power the Earth scheme (I used to like the idea, as a teenager, but that was before the advances in rocketry slowed down to a 50 year crawl) basically argued that it really only worked if you made the solar panels from Moon dirt flung into space from a lunar mass driver - and no one knows how hard that is to do yet. (Yes, Musk has said something about a mass driver on the Moon - but I would bet my last dollar that no one has seriously worked out how much a workable one would cost to set up on the Moon.)
Look at this headline at Fortune, which is just pure BS:
The details in the article:
Musk said getting all that AI and solar capacity in space will require about 10,000 launches a year—or a launch in less than an hour every day. SpaceX is the most prolific rocket company and set a record last year with 165 orbital launches.
SpaceX could pull off a 10,000-per-year launch cadence with 20 to 30 Starship rockets, he added, though the company will make more than that, enabling perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 launches a year.
He pointed out the airline industry has much quicker throughput than that. The number of daily flights around the world tops 100,000.
In case people hadn't noticed: rockets aren't airplanes, and there is zero practical proof that Musk's Starship will ever have the turnaround ease with which he pins his "hopes". The space shuttle was supposed to be able to turn around between missions with relative ease - it never happened.
AND BESIDES - putting massive solar arrays in orbit is just going to make the risk of Kessler syndrome events far, far more likely - and the concern of Kessler himself is that the risk has already soared very high with Musk's Starlink satellite constellations. (Anyone who watches Sabine Hossenfelder would know this - she was only talking about it last week, I think just before Musk's hyped his AI dream). If it happens, Musk will go down in history as the idiot who bought his way into creating a disaster that slowed down humanity's colonisation of any other body due to making it too hard to get safely through low Earth orbit for a 100 years or more.
So yeah, I think it is pretty outrageous that there isn't a more assertive condemnation of Musk promising stuff that the strong consensus of experts would say he cannot possibly deliver.
Update: this guy gets it exactly right, I reckon:
Meanwhile, satellite technology consultant Christian Freiherr von der Ropp says that SpaceX’s plan belongs “more to the realm of speculative vision than near- or mid-term engineering reality.” He pointed to other hurdles such as shielding the data centers from radiation and the economics when it’s easier to maintain and upgrade ground-based data centers.
“Launch, replacement, and station-keeping costs for vast numbers of high-power, short-lifetime compute platforms (in space) would likely exceed the cost of building and operating ground-based data centers supplied by cheap renewable energy,” he said.
Still, von der Ropp suspects Musk’s ambitions are also about marketing. “Proposals of million-satellite 'data centers in space' appear far more aligned with long-term narrative building than with executable infrastructure planning. It is reasonable to interpret such visions as strategic storytelling that highlights technological ambition and future AI compute potential,” he said.
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