SpaceX has acquired xAI, the company announced on Monday, merging two of Elon Musk’s most ambitious companies into the most valuable private company in the world.

  • Fermion@mander.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    18 hours ago

    SpaceX was his one good company thanks to the work of people like Gwynne Shotwell. xAI must not have been getting enough investor interest and rather than admit it’s a stinker, he’s shackling spaceX with it.

    If I were a spaceX investor, I would be absolutely pissed about this and talking to my attorneys.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      18 hours ago

      xAI must not have been getting enough investor interest and rather than admit it’s a stinker, he’s shackling spaceX with it.

      This is the same thing Musk did saddling Tesla (and Tesla public shareholders) with the debt of the failed company Solar City run by his cousin.

      • Mirshe@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        17 hours ago

        Now he’s also retooling Tesla facilities to build his Optimus humanoid robots.

          • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            3
            ·
            16 hours ago

            If they work, it’s going to be other corporations for factory work.

            It’s going to be a long long time before any bot is good enough and cheap enough to be used at the consumer level in our homes.

            • Kirp123@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              7
              ·
              16 hours ago

              They seem so bad for factory work though? One of those robot arms would work so much better than some shitty humanoid robot.

              • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                15 hours ago

                The world is made for general purpose humans including vast amounts of factory space. There will always be things for a general purpose robot to do that’ll be cheaper than designing and manufacturing a low volume bespoke robot.

                Like Amazon is trying and building robots to do a lot of picking, but they can’t even fully automate that.

                It’s more a question of can they solve it (huge if) and even if they do, how many can they actually sell.

              • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                16 hours ago

                Not defending Musk, but the point of humanoid robots is to perform a job currently done by a human worker without modifying the process or tools. Dedicated robot arms are fantastic for factory work, but the jobs they do have to specifically be designed to be done by a robot arm.

                As an example, you can’t put a robot arm at a human workspace and have it open a plastic bag, put an item inside it, and pick up a tape gun seal it with tape. For a robot arm to do that, the entire workspace, and extra robots would have to be added and programmed to accomplish the same task.

  • MCGiorgi@piefed.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    18 hours ago

    Is he just writing off the astronomical debt (pun intended) from xAI and X with this move?

    • tankplanker@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      6 hours ago

      He is also tying it to a company (SpaceX) that the US government relies on, so in the event one of the other basket cases drags everything else down he is trying to ensure he will get bailouts. Any sensible and non corrupt government would just require the dead bits cut off, but we know that isn’t what is in place right now.

    • XLE@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      15 hours ago

      That’s what this sounds like. I believe he did something similar by creating shares and transferring them between “X” the Twitter app, and xAI.