Who is "he"? SpaceX has $20bn of debt and $9bn in "other financing" corresponding to "obligations related to certain AI infrastructure assets recorded as failed sale-leaseback transactions."
I'll keep the below for integrity sake:
Well, i'm sure SpaceX bought Xai using some kind of prefered share/debt financing, but that's not to say that XAI had the original debt financing.
We can never know what the exact details, and the exact financing is on this debt. Maybe it's tied to Elon's Tesla Shares, Maybe it's tied to a convertible, maybe it is actual "loans" from a bank. Even at $9b in debt, and you naivly assume they are paying 10% (Def not 20% as OP claimed), you are paying $900m a year, for the entirety of xAi. Including that in the calculations to rent out the entire compute is folly. Not only is 900M not directly attributed to c1, cause it's split between c1, c2 and all the training runs, but you can never verify the interest. And even then, one month of this deal pays for the whole year of interest expense.
So go ahead and lower my estimate by 10%... doesn't make a difference.
If only there was some SEC filing available disclosing additional information about the 6-months $20bn bridge loan which was on the news four weeks ago…
Uh, starship is still a development program. There's 1 launch pad right now able to launch V3. No starship has flown with an actual live payload. The starlinks going out the PEZ dispenser are probably the only thing launching on it anytime soon.
Basically, Starship launching thousands of tons to orbit isn't constrained by money but by time.
But you are right to call out the launch infrastructure as the true bottleneck. They have 3 pads currently under development. So in 6-9 months they'll have 4 operational pads.
Also, how do they heat tiles hold up? How fast can they catch, refurbish and relaunch is what remains.
I'm confident, and will be putting my money where my mouth is (By investing in the IPO) that they will have useful orbital payloads this year.
Before Starlink we only send up like 1k ton of payload.
Starlink is the only reason why it jumped to 3k tons.
So SpaceX builds all of this to send its own stuff up which is basically only Starlink and in the future its own competition (amazon and leo). For something which is only consumed by 10 million customers right now and they increased the price for starlink which makes it even less competitive.
And Spacex has to send up Starlink every 5 years which keeps revenue low and Starlink is hard llinear growth as one Starlink Satelit can't handle that much traffic.
If his IPO makes all of that money, he will entertain us with funneling billions into a system which will then deliver a handful people onto mars if even.
A person on mars doesn't make money, it costs money.
Whats the goal here?
Total Cost = ∫₀²⁶¹ (380 * 0.85ᵗ + 20) dt
Total Cost = F(261) - F(0)
≈ 5,220.00 - (-2,338.19)
≈ 7,558.19
After that, you will need to start to even develoop server racks full of GPUs for space. You literlay need to engineere from scratch a cooling system which will be a few hundred square feed big. You need to be able to transfer massive amount of energy reliable from a small GPU rack to all of this area.
Than you need to send a few thousand of these constalations up there. Every single micrometeroid, sun storm, broken component means loosing a whole rack immediadlty.
Then you need to actually verify that you can send up all of that infrastructure in space and keep it alive there.
Then you have to assume a certain amount of lifetime which will be a lot shorter than on earth and you can't sell it of. These resources are gone.
To all of this cost, you will have to add latency, data syncronisation between racks has to be complelty engineered from scratch too. We talk about 100 of gigabits between these small constelations.
In the same timespan with a lot less money, you could already build a normal datacenter somewhere on the aquator or just as south in texas as possible. You can service it, you can upgrade it, no issues.
>you could already build a normal datacenter somewhere
Can you? from where i'm sitting it's pretty illegal to build a datacenter in the united states. There has literally been hundreds of projects to build data centers around the US that have gotten canceled due to NIMBY's. Collosus itself is plagued by lawsuits.
All those things you listed aren't deal breakers, and maybe some earth based compute will be used but we simply don't have enough power, political will or the legal system to be able to push these data centers through.
So despite the fact that it is theoretically "Cheaper" to build a ground based system, and it will take 261 starship launches just for a single GW... The math is still mathin'. $33B to make $180B.