this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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Enough Musk Spam

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For those that have had enough of the Elon Musk worship online.

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[–] Didntdoit71@feddit.online 14 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Elon has never been an engineer, so let's set the record straight. He has nothing to do with the quality of Teslas. Any moron who thinks Elon is a good engineer, when he has zero engineering experience nor, to my knowledge any engineering education, immediately loses all respect in my eyes.

[–] Doomsider@lemmy.world 6 points 18 hours ago

No no no, he is an engineer, designer, CEO of three companies, CTO of a company, father of 14, avid computer gamer, ketamine addict, Nazi aficionado, and Zombie Twitter poster extraordinaire with the sickest memes in the galaxy!

Don't get jealous because he works at least 70 hours a day. You just wished you could be that productive. /s

[–] LillyPip@lemmy.ca 46 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Literally, every time Musk says anything in your own field (mine are UX design and programming), you immediately realise he’s a dumbass who knows nothing about anything and is literally bullshitting his way to the top, paraphrasing smarter people without understanding what he’s saying, and just declaring himself a genius.

Thankfully I learnt this very early because he bullshitted about my field pretty early on. Everyone seems to get there eventually, the more industries he claims expertise in.

[–] Naive@lemmy.world 6 points 21 hours ago

Ain't it most of the billionaires? They just know how to tell big lies so that they can earn more money.

[–] NovaVeles@lemmy.world 4 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

When questioned about Twitter, he didn't even know the difference between front-end and back-end on coding. He has done code before at Ebay (it was all re-written by others before deployment), but he should know that and yet it is completely lost on him.

[–] LillyPip@lemmy.ca 7 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

I’m not convinced he coded at eBay. I think he did some markup, which was not coding. That feels like code to someone who doesn’t know what coding is.

[–] nonfuinoncuro@lemmy.zip 3 points 19 hours ago

that's like me saying "you know I do a little coding myself" and the entirety of my experience is setting up a Geocities page in html in the 90s, setting my xanga background picture and music, and aliasing a few bash commands and setting up an update script.

tbf everyone at work thinks I'm a tech god because I spend 2 minutes clicking around menu options before calling IT and I wear glasses

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[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 32 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Musk was never any sort of engineer. He was just the one with daddy's money there to take credit for the work of better people.

[–] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I think the cybertruck is the only thing hes ever had a involvement in creating. and you see how well that went.

everything else he just bought, kicked the original owners out, and gag ordered them, so he can take all the credit.

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[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 12 points 21 hours ago

Well, this academic still has enough respect for Elon to pay him for a blue checkmark…

[–] etc@lemmy.ca 30 points 1 day ago (2 children)

His first mistake was thinking musk was a good engineer.

The only thing musk has ever done was buy or steal tech. He's never had an original thought in his life.

[–] crenquis@lemmy.today 4 points 22 hours ago

Only cool thing he ever did was insist that the spacex engineers figure out to land vertically like ye olde sci fi rockets

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[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 50 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Elon Musk is not an engineer. You'd think an academic would be able to grasp this

[–] KeenFlame@feddit.nu 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

When he rose to fame he was portrayed as an engineer genius, and EVERYONE lied about it. It's not strange people believed it. It's not normal for this to happen.

[–] BonsaiBoo@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I’d argue that rich people being touted as genius in subjects they know very little about and perform fairly poorly at historically until they throw enough money at it and surround themselves with actual experts is actually the norm.

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[–] kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago

And Teslas are NOT well engineered cars.

[–] krokodil2000@thelemmy.club 5 points 1 day ago

And if you allow him to "engineer" a car, you end up with the Cyberstuck.

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[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 13 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Funny, though, that this issue with cooling problems is a long known issue in all things space. This should be obvious to anyone who has seen the cooling fans (infrared radiator plates) of the ISS. And they try to be very, wery careful with creating waste heat.

Maybe Elon should ask someone who actually knows something about space instead of an AI. I mean, this guy has a f-ing company that sends rockets into space. Someone there must be capable to do an ELI5 on that topic, so even Elon can understand it.

[–] InputZero@lemmy.world 14 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

He doesn't want to understand it. He wants to break through it and some sleazy and/or desperate engineers are telling him everything he wants to hear. They understand that it's impossible but they also understand that if they don't cater to his fragile ego they'll be looking for a new job and no job will ever pay more.

Elon legitimately believes that nothing is impossible because his entire life he's been able to pay other people to fix his problems for him and he can't handle the idea that he's not the most special important smartest boy.

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[–] Aeri@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (8 children)

I honestly think saying that Tesla's are good cars is glazing him too much to be honest. They're basically the iPhone of cars. That's not an endorsement by the way that's condemnation I fucking hate iphones. The best thing that Elon musk could be argued to have done is to make people realize that EVS are viable.

[–] blitzen@lemmy.ca 8 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

You're totally allowed to hate iPhones (I'm not arguing otherwise), but iPhone hardware is way better built than Tesla cars. I don't think it's fair to compare the two quality-of-build-wise.

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[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 5 points 22 hours ago

iPhones don’t trap you in a fiery death without door handles lol.

[–] cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

He's also not an engineer.

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[–] Dearth@lemmy.world 7 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Musk sounds like a genius to people who are not experts in things Musk talks about.

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[–] jaykrown@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

Data centers in space is some of the stupidest shit I've ever read.

[–] Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Okay, is the Tesla actually a good car? I know Cyber Trucks are absolute dogshite but what about the others?

[–] Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (2 children)

Depends on context.

If we're talking purely car wise they are pretty decent. The build quality is a bit iffy sometimes but the ride experience is decent.

If we're factoring in price then no. It costs like 40 to 50k USD and even with rebates and ev programs thats way too expensive. Should be closer to 20k to 30k IMO, especially since BYDs would cost around that if they could be sold in the US (probably never happening though)

If we're including branding baggage of elon then doubly no cause my god that guy is an idiot. He could've been the Tony Stark of the tech world back in 2017 or so when everyone thought he was a decent person, but I guess it's too hard to hide his true colors

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[–] EatMyPixelDust@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

I'm with the Felon Mu$krat on this one. Anyone who thinks he's an engineer is retarded.

[–] FE80@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Do it, put the data centers in space. I long for the hilarity.

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[–] Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 18 hours ago

I want the fucker to try. Let him blow billions in chasing a stupid idea.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Only the stupidest people thought data centers in space was ever gonna be a thing. I mean, dumber than a rock level of stupid. Sadly, that pleased the market. We deserve to wipe ourselves out.

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[–] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 day ago

A "genius" trillionaire's only retort is name-calling? What a big fat stupid head. /s

[–] party_planet@lemmy.world 5 points 23 hours ago

any got the source of Elon saying that about cooling in space? I'd love to send it round some friends

[–] KatherinaReichelt@feddit.org 32 points 1 day ago (3 children)

He is the richest guy on earth. He could do anything. Fly his personal airship over the alps. Go scuba-diving at the best spots. Invite the smartest or funniest people on earth for a personal chat. Or he could fund artists. Go jet-skiing in the maledives. Do really cool things. But all he does is spitting insults on Twitter. Which is pathetic

[–] Tiger666@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Don't forget the child porn and the fascism. You never forget the fascism and child porn.

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[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 44 points 1 day ago (18 children)

So, you know how a good thermos keeps its contents hot or cold, depending on what you put in it?

You know the trick they use to do that? They use a vacuum.

Heat can be passively transferred using convection, conduction and radiation. Convection requires the movement of fluid, there's no fluid in a vacuum so that can't happen. Conduction requires that one vibrating molecule causes another adjacent molecule to vibrate. Again, not possible in a vacuum because there are no molecules to transfer that vibration. That leaves radiation.

(In a thermos it's not quite that simple. A thermos isn't floating in space, the outside needs to connect to the inside somehow, so even though there's a big vacuum bottle, the heat gets transferred through the parts that aren't in a vacuum.)

Radiation is possible in a vacuum, it's just really inefficient. People used to see radiation transfer in a vacuum all the time: incandescent light bulbs. They're much more rare these days. But, in that case a filament was heated up so much that it glowed white hot. To reduce the heat transfer, that white hot filament was put in a vacuum -- the bulb of the light bulb. If you ever touched one, you know they got hot. But, the filament was 2500 celsius, and the bulb itself was maybe slightly over 100C. That shows how inefficient radiation is. Even with something that's thousands of degrees, it only heated the glass of the bulb from say 20C to 120C.

So, it's hard to dump heat in space. The only thing that works is radiation, and radiation is much less effective when things are not glowing white hot. In addition, anything in space is getting heated up by the sun. So, not only do you need to dump any heat the device produces itself, it also needs to dump any heat it's receiving from the sun.

What are two of the main things that datacenters need? Power and cooling. The need for power is famous because it's driving up electricity costs. The need for cooling is well known because of all the water being used.

To meet the power needs, a datacenter would need massive solar panels to collect as much sunlight as possible. The solar panels on the ISS provide about 30kW of power. A small datacenter (and I mean small), uses 1 MW. So, for one small DC you'd need 30x the number of solar panels as on the ISS. If you're talking a conventional pre-AI datacenter, it's more like 100MW, so you'd need 3000x the number of solar panels as on the ISS.

Solar panels create electricity from sunlight, but by design they have to be facing the sun, which means they get heated up too. So, before you even turn on a computer in the DC, you have to find a way to dump all that heat that the solar panels are creating. Then, let's say you want to actually turn on the computers in the DC. On earth can be cooled by dumping water on something hot and letting water evaporate. That's really easy to do, and really cheap. You just move the heat from the computers into the water and it goes into the sky. But, in space, there's no sky to evaporate into, and no source of water. So, you need radiative cooling. Now, just imagine how much radiative cooling you'd need to match the performance of a simple "dump water on it" cooling system.

tl;dr: The idea of datacenters in space is ludicrous. Even someone as stupid as Musk knows that. But, investors are dumber than Musk -- or at least investors think that there are other investors that dumb, so they won't get stuck with the shares if they need to sell them. Musk needs the belief that datacenters in space to be possible or his shares all crash in value.

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[–] NotAnOtter@lemmus.org 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

He hasn't been involved in an engineer project in 20+ years. He did some SWE at paypal and then lead some of the first teams at spacex. That was the last time he was even 2 steps removed from a tech team.

Everything since then has been filtered through multiple layers of middle management and executive staff. It would be way more reasonable to respect him as a businessman or maybe a visionary than an engineer. (not that I'm advocating for the existence of that respect in the first place).

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[–] VinegarChunks@lemmus.org 17 points 1 day ago

They should build data centers in frigid climates next to large building complexes, so they can pump the heat into those buildings.

[–] SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It’s funny how musk often tries to put pop culture references in his “insults” and then it falls completely flat. Like he clearly was referencing Trophic Thunder’s “Never go full retard” line. But he used it in such a dumb way that it makes him look even dumber. Like who even says “fully retarted”

[–] qarbone@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

Like he clearly was referencing Trophic Thunder’s “Never go full retard” line.

I don't think that is a clear reference; I think you're giving him undue credit. Saying something is "fully " surely predates the movie. I've seen Musk's failures more in the timing than the method: he fails because he doesn't know when to meme (and when not to) rather than a geriatric ignorance on how to form the meme. So he should have been able to make a closer, more apparent reference, like "You went full retard," instead of what he did there.

I think he is just being an asshole.

[–] Jiral@lemmy.world 3 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

I think we will see those small things, basically a single server rack with huge solar panels and cooling radiators. Some companies are really motivated to burn someone's money for that and it is somewhat realistic to pull off, even with the big challenge of cooling. At the same time it also makes zero economic sense and has next to no computing power to even a small datacentre back on earth.

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