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Comment by ban-evader | Hacker News Reader

The story about how they made this happen in such a short period is impressive to say the least. Elon’s strength seems to be making things happen.

Getting the largest computer cluster in the world up and running in a matter of months? Unbelievable.

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Elon's strength is a massive wallet.

I guess you didn't watch the videon in OP, because if you had, you'd know that they tried to buy the buildout and got quotes for 12-18 months, then decided to do it themselves instead.

That's the power of having a massive wallet. If you have unlimited money then buying the experts you need to just do it yourself is an option you have that others don't.

My point is that that is exactly what they DIDN'T do. They tried to buy the experts, but the experts would not have been fast enough. So they did it themselves.

Setting up a datacenter like that in such a short time is NOT a thing you can buy with money.

When I say buy the experts I don't mean contract out to experts. I mean hire them and buy all the equipment yourselves.

The way the story was told, at least, they did NOT hire the experts.

You have other people in this thread talking about how xAI offers massive salaries to top talent so it sounds like they do exactly that. Have the money to both hire experts and buy the equipment. I don't even know why this is a discussion, by virtue of doing what they did they needed to hire experts and buy equipment.

They didn't hire the top talent in datacenter-building, because they had the expectation that they could buy a data center buildout. Sure, they hired top talent from other fields, to work other tasks, but that's unrelated to this.

Anyway, I don't have inside information on this, I'm just reciting what they announced publicly. If you want to argue that they in fact lied in the public announcement, and they secretly hired a bunch of datacenter-building-experts, then it's on you to show some proof for that claim.

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I’m not sure if that’s the case. He’s obviously a smart man, but what’s truly unbelievable is that someone has so much resources that they can make something like this happen (what looks like) pretty casually.

He knows how to take money from people and then market things as if they’re his creations which then turns into him having more money because people think it’s a good investment to give him more money. It’s really quite a genius con he has going. It seems as if the sky is the limit too.

Remember when he got caught having people play games for him so he had a top ranking ? He does that with basically everything.

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