Elon Musk recommends that the International Space Station be deorbited ASAP
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
He's also gutting the FDA, USAID, CFPB, and FAA, all institutions that his businesses have come in conflict with: https://bsky.app/profile/rbreich.bsky.social/post/3likloythd...
And according to the WSJ, Yaccarino is now threatening advertisers to spend more money, "or else": https://x.com/bungarsargon/status/1892659483806924994
And still, otherwise sober-seeming people on this site continue to make excuses and give him the benefit of the doubt that he has some kind of good intentions.
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This hits it on the nose. Musk is using his political influence to lock out the competition and siphon billions of government spending to his own company. It's a crystal clear conflict of interest and exposes the real purpose of DOGE.
The push to the Moon was a national project that resulted from the vision of an elected leader with at least some controls on his power, and never promised to create a society beyond the authorities of Earth. Musk's push to Mars is the opposite.
The ISS is old and is only getting older, but if it means having a place to do some science that would otherwise not be done, and draining funds that would otherwise be used by an ethically-questionable human being to make himself the emperor of Mars... keep it in orbit.
On the bright side, it'll happen, one might predict, about 6 months maybe 12 months at the outside after a Tesla has completed a fully autonomous coast to coast drive.
What's the old saying about homeowners associations keeping Nazis busy so they can't do damage elsewhere? The quicker we can get this guy to Mars and set him up as Emperor God of Mars, the quicker we can get him out of our hair.
> I asked Musk if he meant that NASA and the US government should commit to the 2030 end-of-life date, or if he wanted to accelerate the timeline for the station's demise.
> "The decision is up to the President, but my recommendation is as soon as possible. I recommend 2 years from now," Musk replied.
So it's not like this is coming completely out of the blue, but it's hilarious Elon's continued heel turn. He went anti-tech, abandoned his environmental/EV fans, and now he takes aim at space nerds? Are there any of his original supporters left to piss off?
We should start teaching children emotional intelligence daily in K-12, including niche topics like how to spot sociopaths, narcissists, ..., and all other forms of monsters. Perhaps in a generation we can learn to stop giving these deeply damaged and dangerous people any kind of power over us.
I mean, it seems like a fair number of them don’t care what he does, or how - he’s a “genius” and everything he does is perfect, much like his VP.
Excuses will always abound.
Oh, yeah; some people can rationalise anything if they're sufficiently emotionally invested in a figure.
Fans of Atlas Shrugged
It is not. Tech increasingly controls human lives, insofar is the way things are coded only allow for outcomes consistent with the codebase (whether intentional outcomes or not), that are dictated by the user's flow through the codebase. When you control a human life's outcomes, you are doing something explicitly political.
Every dollar flowing into X, Amazon, Meta is now a dollar that ladders up directly (Elon Musk) or indirectly (donations to Trump) to the current administration.
When anyone can donate unlimited amounts to SuperPACs--when money is regarded as speech--then everything with a dollar value is political.
Until political campaigns are funded by tax dollars, and capped at that level, everything that is touched by money, not just tech, is political.
That's a great point.
Weren't the Russians pulling out of supporting it in 2025?
> Russia has even suggested it may pull out of the ISS as early as 2025.
Though I couldn't find an actual quote from Roscosmos just a BBC article.
They do get paid for it? I'd imagine it's bringing in a chunk of change and they'd be happy to let it keep flying. But as a sibling post, politically it's not advantageous for them perhaps.
Ha, fair point ;-)
> I'm sure politics play a non-trivial role
Yeah, they may get paid to fly supply missions, but it's still a tiny bit uncomfortable to claim on TV how they are cooperating with the "evil Anglo-Saxons" (their strange propaganda term for the West) to supply the ISS.
The article didn't mention anything interesting. Perhaps they would have if there was going to be actually interesting work?
Perhaps Musk knows what's scheduled to take place and in his opinion its all a waste of time. Just because someone else thinks it is important doesn't mean it does. I think it's fine to have the conversation, especially if it saves money, considering the US is 10's of trillions in debt.
This tweet is none of that.
Musk's opinion on anything is worthless.
Musk's talent is not tech, and it's not "first principles" or anything like that. His talent is getting idiot investors to invest ... and not ask for their money back until it's far too late.
@Thunderf00t's latest video about the Starship crash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0uFO6BjWSs
But the whole channel is interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/@Thunderf00t/videos
Thunderf00t's claim is that Musk is not taking over the government out of patriotism, but because his businesses are 100% dependent on continued government investment, because they're burning through investor cash. MASSIVE continued government investment.
The general theory being that Musk has dethroned Bernie Madoff as the biggest US fraudster ever, that this has already happened, but won't come out until fresh government money stops increasing, we just don't know it yet.
Tesla is losing money hand over fist
No, it's not. Its 2024 operating income was $7B. SpaceX is losing money
No, it's not. It reached profitability in 2023 and has substantially grown revenue since then. (and would be hemorrhaging money if not for US government spending)
No, it wouldn't. Most of SpaceX's revenue is from Starlink. https://www.fool.com/investing/2025/02/10/its-official-starl... The Boring company is bankrupt
No, it's not.Stop spreading misinformation. Check your facts before you post them.
Neuralink is losing money
What an absolutely ridiculous thing to say about an early stage startup, working diligently on creating a valuable new medical technology, with significant publicly visible progress. Especially ridiculous to say on this platform.Yes, that obviously means it's not investor cash, that it's real profit, right? Entirely reasonable view, that. In Europe this is called a "carousel" (named after the old French merry-go-rounds) and it's almost always a form of fraud.
The reason this is often fraud is that they pay each other in fake, but not fake according to accounting rules, money. Lots of things are money "equivalents" in accounting. Loans given out. Shares. Letters of credit. Goodwill. Etc. The way you implement this fraud is that you make SpaceX buy something expensive from Starlink and vice-versa. Then you pay this with anything that is not money (e.g. shares, loan, delays on payments due, ...), that have been freshly printed by the company. Now, by accounting rules, the value of both companies has gone up by (if you do it right) twice the value of the zero-dollar exchange. This is what's going on with companies when their income/revenue is high ... and "somehow" their cashflow is low (both companies publish their income/revenue ... but hide their cashflow statements. "I wonder why")
One of the ways to do this ... which for "some reason" we'll call the Amazon trick is to start 2 companies. Then get cashflow going between them. To illustrate let's buy a bakery. You split the bakery. One company is the store. One company actually bakes the goods to be sold. The relevant part of this is that it's exactly the same as before, except there's now (virtual) cashflow between the two companies. Initially, you buy a pie, the cash is immediately divided up between the store and the bakery. Then you load up the bakery AND the store with debt, by slowly increasing the terms of payment. Settlement-after-15-days. Then 30. Then 60. Then 90. Then 6 months. The key is that the cashflow gets going, and is assumed in accounting to extend into infinity. Now look at what happens. If the s series is what the store makes and p is what it pays to the bakery. Now look at the profits:
Initial monthly profit: s1 - p1, s2 - p2, s3 - p3, ...
Change to settlement at 30 after the first month.
Profit now: s1 - p1, s2, s3 - p2, s4 - p3, ...
So the second months REVENUE goes 100% into your pocket (it's not profit, it's used to buy shares from you, read on). Now change to 60 days. 90 days. 6 months.
Now do the same, but pay in shares of the bakery (while taking out bank loans). If you have cash flow you can do this for at least half a year's revenue (which you get on both sides of the equation if, like Musk, you own both companies, so you get a full year's REVENUE (not profit, revenue) in your pocket, free). And if you now sell the company with the "massive increase in profit" ... AND since the store has signed a contract to pay (and has ideally a long history of paying), it's very easy to get (ideally) investors, but also banks to cover this amount. Who do they buy the shares from? From you! And if you're truly desperate, like Musk, who is buying the shares of the store? The bakery! And who is buying the shares of the bakery? The store! If you look at how this happens, you will realize that it's near impossible for states or banks to stop this, and investors, frankly, don't even try.
And of course, this is totally not what happened with SpaceX and Starlink. Oh, and, obviously, there's reasons that Musk would never ever do this if SpaceX turned a profit (he'd be stealing from himself, essentially). Frauds, all frauds, are dependent on the original investor getting out, or in this case, on Musk selling shares. And, surprise, surprise, Musk has done this kind of split and he is selling shares like mad ...
Tesla is similar. If you take out government subsidies, Tesla is losing money hand over fist. That includes the Federal government buying "cybertrucks", which is such an incredibly bad idea on so many different levels.
It's actually a pretty clever way to avoid the conflict, have others push to keep the space station and thus the necessary transport contracts with SpaceX. Not only this but it also aligns with his stated decades-long goal of focusing on a manned mission to Mars.
"Uh, no, you don't see the brilliance! He's advocating for deorbiting the ISS while calling astronauts retarded to trick people into keeping the ISS up and running!"
SMDH.
You don't have to justify his every thought. The simplest answer is typically the right one.
Quite the galaxy brained idea indeed. Keep in mind however that the galaxy is mostly vacuum.
>> Hannity: You’re going to help rescue two astronauts
>> Musk: They were left up there for political reasons
> What a lie.
> And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.
* https://twitter.com/Astro_Andreas/status/1892517170384392664
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Mogensen
The response to that was:
> You are fully retarded.
> SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago.
> I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused.
> Return WAS pushed back for political reasons.
> Idiot.
> I was the Commander of the @ISS when Andy, @Astro_Andreas flew his first space mission. He is one of the most competent, trustworthy, and honest people I’ve ever met. This rhetoric is beyond the pale but, sadly, not surprising. He does not deserve this kind of disrespect.
* https://twitter.com/StationCDRKelly/status/18928092014766530...
And then build some real things up there, not tiny tin cans with foul air.
Like these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_wheel_space_station please?
Waste and inefficiency
The current administration will attempt to do many dumb things, like any human beings. Crying wolf at every action or opinion diminishes the other side's creditability for when it matters. This is bad for all of us.
Most human beings aren't in charge of the free world and whose decisions have cascading effects on everyone.
And those that are generally tend to be fairly elected and confirmed with a set of checks and balances governing their actions to limit the impact of stupid decisions. Elon Musk is none of those.
My point with "like any human beings" was to not demonize the current group, and point out that any group of people in power will do stupid things.
This shouldn't be ignored, it's one of a thousand things that have happened lately that, very much in living memory, would (any one of them!) have for-sure and for excellent reasons been the end of someone's influence on public life. All of those matter.
Him saying the ISS should be deorbited after 27 years rather than 30 years isn't a disqualifying opinion.
Freaking out at perfectly valid opinions or actions is a bad thing to do. If you are constantly screaming over nothing, you'll be tuned out, and that's bad for when there are real things to scream about.