Leah Feiger: Talking about him. Yeah. Absolutely.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. It’s just this web. It fills out this web.
Leah Feiger: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, these are the tech titans.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. Up until as recently as 2019, I think some of these people were actively in touch.
Leah Feiger: Wow. So speaking of Elon, he was also in the news this week for an entirely different thing, aka rolling xAI into SpaceX, officially creating the world’s most valuable private company. We’ve got to talk about that.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. And I know that you love … This combines your two favorite things.
Leah Feiger: Oh, yes. Absolutely.
Brian Barrett: AI and Elon Musk.
Leah Feiger: Uh-huh.
Brian Barrett: Leah, could I also interest you in a potential third favorite thing?
Leah Feiger: Oh, hit me, Brian.
Brian Barrett: Can I interest you in data centers in space?
Leah Feiger: So that’s what he’s promising, right?
Brian Barrett: Yeah.
Leah Feiger: I’m actually very interested in data centers.
Brian Barrett: Oh, good.
Leah Feiger: Molly Taft, our wonderful climate reporter on the science desk, has entirely turned me around on how important it is to engage with them. I hate them, but I am very interested in them. So he wants to build a data center in space. What does that mean? What is a terrestrial solution? Please explain all of these things.
Brian Barrett: Well, basically, yeah. So Elon Musk’s pitch for combining SpaceX and xAI. And just to back up a second, SpaceX is Elon Musk’s most mainstream, noncontroversial company, probably.
Leah Feiger: It’s his rocket company.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. It’s his rocket company. They basically have privatized NASA, partly because NASA gave up. Anyway …
Leah Feiger: No.
Brian Barrett: The US space future really depends on SpaceX in so many ways.
Leah Feiger: If Jeff Bezos is listening to this podcast, he’s having just a true—
Brian Barrett: Sorry, Blue Origin. Yeah. Oh, gosh.
Leah Feiger: Internal.
Brian Barrett: Terrible day. Blue Origin also there. So on the one hand, you’ve got this sort of future of US space travel, and on the other side you’ve got xAI, which is Elon Musk’s AI company that keeps undressing women nonconsensually.
Leah Feiger: And is also X, formerly known as Twitter.
Brian Barrett: Yes. And now they’re all going to be the same thing.
Leah Feiger: Former Twitter employees, did they make a lot of money from this? What’s happening? How are all of these companies now the same thing? None of this has relations to each other other than Elon Musk.
Brian Barrett: So he would argue differently. And so the case that he would make is that in order for AI to get where it needs to be, wherever that is—faster undressing of more women—for it to get there, there’s literally not enough energy on Earth to make that happen. So what you need to do is you need to go out in space and harness the energy of the sun to power AI. And who is really good at going out into space and harnessing things? SpaceX.
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