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Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

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Sometimes, I wonder how people in the middle ages accepted the whole "Divine Right" of their ruling Kings, while simultaneously suffering under their rule.

> Larry Ellison, another hyper-informed genius business man

"King George, another royal blessed by the divine."

I don't know if you're aware of this, but American markets are hyper competitive. I'd be extremely wary of any instinct to discount the skill level of any top-20 self-made billionaire industrialist, really anywhere in the world, but in the US at least, that skillset is likely heavily skewed toward business excellence.

> self-made billionaire industrialist

We've reached levels of billionaire worship that would make any court jester of the 1400's blush

An off-the-cuff four word description on an Internet forum definitely exceeds the level of worship from a court jester in the 1400s that had to dress up in costume and dance at the command of a king, lest their head get cut off.

Well jesters are supposed to call out the BS, yes?

That said, How do you (accurately) describe Ellison?

Greedy, ruthless and well-connected? These people are hardly genuises.

> Greedy, ruthless and well-connected?

Sure, but that's not enough.

> These people are hardly genuises.

You're quite wrong about this. I know it's tempting to look at a damaged person and assume that they possess no actual extraordinary capabilities, but these people are very very smart. Surely they'd be top-tier HN. :)

(Defining "genius" is a whole nother thing, but using any common vernacular meaning, my statement will apply.)

Not all billionaires, of course. In context, we're talking about Ellison and Musk. There may be others implied. These people are in fact extremely intelligent. What's missing is not horsepower.

> Sure, but that's not enough.

You're right - a healthy dose of luck, 'right place, right time', is also needed. Plus the arrogance to assume that they deserve everything they want.

> You're quite wrong about this. I know it's tempting to look at a damaged person and assume that they possess no actual extraordinary capabilities, but these people are very very smart. Surely they'd be top-tier HN. :)

Maybe you and I disagree on the definition of a genius; Ellison and Musk are of course smart, but there are very many smart people - that is also not sufficient, and 'genius' is not required. Elon Musk spends a lot of time arguing with random people on Twitter, and espouses some very dumb, and sometimes racist views. He's a good salesman (principally of himself), and possessed of huge self-confidence, but I don't see any evidence of genius. More like being born 3-0 up and convinced he'd scored a hat-trick, amplified by survivor bias; for every billionaire, there are thousands like them who just didn't get the right breaks.

Compare Elon and 'lawnmower' Larry to everyone's favourite genius, Einstein, and they're not even in the same league.

Underestimation is a mistake with at least equal consequences as anthropomorphization.

I recommend neither.

Why does he need a description? If Larry Ellison thinks something is true he can argue the case for it using the same universal logical principles which we all have access to.

Who he is is irrelevant.

lawnmower

> American markets are hyper competitive

Eh. Brand new markets, perhaps. But established markets in the US favor incumbents and encourage monopoly.

Monopoly - so easy everyone can do it. We should give it a go! I would include managing your way into monopoly status and steering clear of being broken up as business skills; no?

The techbro cult is filled to bursting with greedy, narcissistic people who are wholly willing to ignore evil because they expect to be the next dispensers of said evil.

You just responded to one of them.

> I am super intrigued that Elon thinks this.

He has a habit of saying things that ultimately are just hype building. I do not believe that he really believes in space data-clusters.

That's the most measured Elon critique I've read today. :)

I've been told by SpaceX folk that Elon's job is to keep a 20 year view in the future and essentially get folks to work backward from that.

I think I might kind of be sold on data-clusters in space in 20 years.

I can understand if I had lift that cost 1/10 what everyone else in the world paid for it, I'd be even more sold on them.

That said, this newfound enthusiasm of his certainly makes a commercially reasonable path forward to turn xAI stock into spacex stock. Elon takes care of his investors, generally speaking.

I believe that he believe the hype will be good for SpaceX IPO.

Starlink runs special rad-hard computers from AMD. None of that transfers to top of the line GPUs. This is crazy.

SpaceX supposedly mostly runs non-rad-hard parts, the ostensible reason being because its more cost effective to double or triple up than buy specialty equipment. Do you have a source for this?

You are conflating with their rockets. They don’t go space grade in their rockets because they don’t need to. They’re not up there for very long, and the avionics can be shielded behind large rocket stages.

Starlink satellites use space-rated AMD Versal chips: https://www.pcmag.com/news/amd-chips-are-powering-newest-sta...

Possibly, although that article seems quite confused as well (of course they need custom silicon, and of course that doesn't mean anything about what COTS parts they do or don't use). It would be nice if SpaceX would publish more about its compute architecture.

Google tested the radiation tolerance of tpus which include hbm and they performed fine. https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl...

That is not a realistic test, as any space engineer could’ve told them. First of all that’s on the very low end for a cosmic ray, an order of magnitude below the average energy. But the average energy doesn’t matter because there is a very wide distribution and the much more intensive cosmic rays do far more damage. It was also not a fully integrated test with a spacecraft, which matters because a high energy cosmic ray, striking other parts of the spacecraft, generates a shower of secondary particles that do most of the damage of a cosmic ray strike.

> He's got more information about space based compute deployments than any other person in the world...

He also had more information about self-driving progress than any other person in the world - yet he was wrong with his predictions every year for last 10 years.

> I will say there's a MASSIVE cost to getting power infrastructure, land, legal stuff done on terra firma; all that just sort of .. goes away when you're deploying to space, at least if you're deploying to space early and fast.

You need both power infrastructure and structures to build within for deploying in space too. And you have to build them and then put it all into space.

Cost per square foot of land is not that high basically anywhere you could build a datacentre to offset that.

Well some stuff you either don't need, or just can't have so you do something different - for instance, transformers to convert grid power - no grid - no transformers. Those are like a 36 month wait list in the US right now. And solar is something like 2x as efficient in space.

I agree those don't seem immediately to be huge wins to me; not dealing with local politics might be a big one, though. Depending on location. There's a lot of red tape in the world.

They don’t need the grid if they’re deploying their own solar. I find it exceedingly unlikely that there is nowhere in the U.S., much less the world, that they couldn’t use some of Tesla’s battery experience to deploy a boatload of solar panels and batteries for less than the launch costs, and then have something which can be serviced or upgraded in place.

$/sq foot or meter belies the cost of dealing with every regulatory agency that has claim on that area. There's no environmental commission you've got to pay off if your satellite starts leaking noxious chemicals all over the place, the same way you'd have to if you spilled something at NUMMI in Fremont, California.

We should take a hyperloop trip together, connect our nuralinks and figure this out together. Or perhaps our optimus bots can help us understand?

> like Larry Ellison, another hyper-informed genius business man

Don’t anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.

I’ve heard him referred to as Darth Vader, it’s true

Elon doesn't think this. Elon says whatever bullshit thing comes into his head without regard for technical, economic or physical plausibility. As long as it raises the stock price!

The market has had almost a hundred years of being well-regulated, so when a sociopath lies through their teeth, we're inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. But in the last few years, that regulation has been worn down to nothing, and the result is and was entirely predictable: fraud.

But spacex isnt a publicly traded company.

This just reads like Elon trying to leverage the AI bubble to prop up SpaceX stock to me.

SpaceX stock needs no propping.

That said xAI might need a bit of a rescue.

It's going to be really funny if this ends up killing SpaceX in the long run.

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