Fun fact: Musk isn't an engineer at all.

Engineering qualifications are pretty specific, and usually the term shouldn't be used loosely if those qualifications aren't there. Musk's education ended at the Baccalaureate level, but crucially in Physics and Economics. He pushes himself as some kind of engineering mastermind, but it's hard to pin down why.

Contrary to popular belief, he also is not a founder of Tesla.

Wtf Teslas are good cars? Debatable. But how does that make Elon a good engineer? He is the hype man and has absolutely nothing to do with the engineering of the cars.

They are right about the whole datacenters in space thing tho. Getting power and losing heat is very hard in space. And we're not even talking about the effects of radiation on the hardware, the depreciation making ROI impossible and the added costs of getting it up there. Literally the exact same hardware but on the ground instead of space would make more money. Not to mention the latency and unable to repair or upgrade anything. Anyone who's ever been to a datacenter knows those things have people coming and going all the time, they require maintenance. And calling it a datacenter is beyond ridiculous, even if they launch the biggest sat ever made, it wouldn't even have a fraction of what a small modern data center can provide. Just going bigger isn't a simple thing at all, transporting heat and power around is hard. And materials have limits, a solar panel can only be so large before natural oscillations shake the thing apart.

The only thing datacenters in space do is keep SpaceX in business, which is something Elon wants, so for him they are great. For the rest of the world, not so much. There is zero reason for any compute to be in orbit.

And Musk could have easily scored big points if he invested heavily into solar panels combined with the battery tech they already have. If those datacenters would provide energy instead of taking it away, that's at least one concern less. And even if the whole AI thing collapsed and the datacenters became useless, they would still make good solar farms and energy storage. If they would help stabilize the grid with their batteries, getting a connection to the grid wouldn't be as big of an issue. But instead they chose the worst fucking option, gas powered turbines for local energy production. Bad for the environment, making lots of noise and local pollution plus driving up the cost of fuel. At least they aren't building coal plants, but it's close.

And the only solar Musk ever promoted was a total scam, nothing of what he told investors about those solar roofs was true. And not of it ever worked, the whole thing was non-functional. How Musk isn't in jail for that or one of the many other times he lied to investors is a mystery to me. Oh no it's not, he has money and laws don't apply to rich people, my bad.

Elon Musk isn't an engineer. He's a capitalist. (Plays with money)

Elon Musk is not an engineer. You'd think an academic would be able to grasp this

Literally, every time Musk says anything in your own field (mine are UX design and programming), you immediately realise he’s a dumbass who knows nothing about anything and is literally bullshitting his way to the top, paraphrasing smarter people without understanding what he’s saying, and just declaring himself a genius.

Thankfully I learnt this very early because he bullshitted about my field pretty early on. Everyone seems to get there eventually, the more industries he claims expertise in.

So, you know how a good thermos keeps its contents hot or cold, depending on what you put in it?

You know the trick they use to do that? They use a vacuum.

Heat can be passively transferred using convection, conduction and radiation. Convection requires the movement of fluid, there's no fluid in a vacuum so that can't happen. Conduction requires that one vibrating molecule causes another adjacent molecule to vibrate. Again, not possible in a vacuum because there are no molecules to transfer that vibration. That leaves radiation.

(In a thermos it's not quite that simple. A thermos isn't floating in space, the outside needs to connect to the inside somehow, so even though there's a big vacuum bottle, the heat gets transferred through the parts that aren't in a vacuum.)

Radiation is possible in a vacuum, it's just really inefficient. People used to see radiation transfer in a vacuum all the time: incandescent light bulbs. They're much more rare these days. But, in that case a filament was heated up so much that it glowed white hot. To reduce the heat transfer, that white hot filament was put in a vacuum -- the bulb of the light bulb. If you ever touched one, you know they got hot. But, the filament was 2500 celsius, and the bulb itself was maybe slightly over 100C. That shows how inefficient radiation is. Even with something that's thousands of degrees, it only heated the glass of the bulb from say 20C to 120C.

So, it's hard to dump heat in space. The only thing that works is radiation, and radiation is much less effective when things are not glowing white hot. In addition, anything in space is getting heated up by the sun. So, not only do you need to dump any heat the device produces itself, it also needs to dump any heat it's receiving from the sun.

What are two of the main things that datacenters need? Power and cooling. The need for power is famous because it's driving up electricity costs. The need for cooling is well known because of all the water being used.

To meet the power needs, a datacenter would need massive solar panels to collect as much sunlight as possible. The solar panels on the ISS provide about 30kW of power. A small datacenter (and I mean small), uses 1 MW. So, for one small DC you'd need 30x the number of solar panels as on the ISS. If you're talking a conventional pre-AI datacenter, it's more like 100MW, so you'd need 3000x the number of solar panels as on the ISS.

Solar panels create electricity from sunlight, but by design they have to be facing the sun, which means they get heated up too. So, before you even turn on a computer in the DC, you have to find a way to dump all that heat that the solar panels are creating. Then, let's say you want to actually turn on the computers in the DC. On earth can be cooled by dumping water on something hot and letting water evaporate. That's really easy to do, and really cheap. You just move the heat from the computers into the water and it goes into the sky. But, in space, there's no sky to evaporate into, and no source of water. So, you need radiative cooling. Now, just imagine how much radiative cooling you'd need to match the performance of a simple "dump water on it" cooling system.

tl;dr: The idea of datacenters in space is ludicrous. Even someone as stupid as Musk knows that. But, investors are dumber than Musk -- or at least investors think that there are other investors that dumb, so they won't get stuck with the shares if they need to sell them. Musk needs the belief that datacenters in space to be possible or his shares all crash in value.

188k likes? I don't Twitter. Is the echo chamber really that bad or does he just have it set to automatically give him like 150k likes on every post through the backend?

Elon Musk is the personification of a moron’s hallucination of a genius.

Musk was never any sort of engineer. He was just the one with daddy's money there to take credit for the work of better people.

He is the richest guy on earth. He could do anything. Fly his personal airship over the alps. Go scuba-diving at the best spots. Invite the smartest or funniest people on earth for a personal chat. Or he could fund artists. Go jet-skiing in the maledives. Do really cool things. But all he does is spitting insults on Twitter. Which is pathetic

His first mistake was thinking musk was a good engineer.

The only thing musk has ever done was buy or steal tech. He's never had an original thought in his life.

Tesla is a good car? 🤔🧐🤨😐

Imagine having more money than your extended family could ever spend, the ear of the President, unelected power over governmental institutions, zero accountability, your entire family line can do anything and everything they could ever want... and still choosing to spend your limited time on this planet arguing with internet trolls, hoarding money, and throwing slurs at the science people who made your company and obscene wealth possible. That's why billionaires are pathetic...

A "genius" trillionaire's only retort is name-calling? What a big fat stupid head. /s

I honestly think saying that Tesla's are good cars is glazing him too much to be honest. They're basically the iPhone of cars. That's not an endorsement by the way that's condemnation I fucking hate iphones. The best thing that Elon musk could be argued to have done is to make people realize that EVS are viable.

All that money, power and fame... and he types slurs at people who criticize him online. There are many facets of pathetic to this.

They should build data centers in frigid climates next to large building complexes, so they can pump the heat into those buildings.

Elon has never been an engineer, so let's set the record straight. He has nothing to do with the quality of Teslas. Any moron who thinks Elon is a good engineer, when he has zero engineering experience nor, to my knowledge any engineering education, immediately loses all respect in my eyes.

My favorite part of is that the reason there is so little convective heat transfer is space is the same reason the temperature is so low.

I get this isn't super common knowledge but yikes lol

Funny, though, that this issue with cooling problems is a long known issue in all things space. This should be obvious to anyone who has seen the cooling fans (infrared radiator plates) of the ISS. And they try to be very, wery careful with creating waste heat.

Maybe Elon should ask someone who actually knows something about space instead of an AI. I mean, this guy has a f-ing company that sends rockets into space. Someone there must be capable to do an ELI5 on that topic, so even Elon can understand it.

There are few things funnier than someone being wrong at the top of their voice.

Well, this academic still has enough respect for Elon to pay him for a blue checkmark…

It’s funny how musk often tries to put pop culture references in his “insults” and then it falls completely flat. Like he clearly was referencing Trophic Thunder’s “Never go full retard” line. But he used it in such a dumb way that it makes him look even dumber. Like who even says “fully retarted”

Okay, is the Tesla actually a good car? I know Cyber Trucks are absolute dogshite but what about the others?

Do it, put the data centers in space. I long for the hilarity.