Saturday, June 20, 2026

We are not Musk.

The initial public offering (IPO) of Elon Musk's Texas-based SpaceX raised at least $75 billion from financial firms which bought shares at $135 a piece." Musk plans to use the money "to fund new future ventures: mining asteroids, colonizing Mars and putting AI data centers in space." BBC. SpaceX is valued at $1.75 trillion. Sounds crazy but, "SpaceX's valuation surged past $2 trillion following its blockbuster Nasdaq debut last week." However, after the initial buying it was down 6.5% to $178.50 on 18 June on profit taking. "It was still more than 30% above its $135 offering price." Reuters. SpaceX is one of its kind in the technology of reusable rockets. "The technology has reduced the cost of launching satellites from over $54 million per kilogram, to under $3 million." Today it conducts over 100 launches to earth's orbit annually. "The booster stages of reusable rockets can be used several times...one of its rockets was reused over 25 times," wrote Shouvik Das. This is somewhat like Henry Ford's assembly line which reduced the manufacturing time of a Model T from 12 hours to just 90 minutes and its cost from $825 in 1908 to just $260 in 1925. Also, Ford more than doubled the daily wages "from $2.25 to $5 a day, and therefore gave his own employees the opportunity to purchase the product they made." Automotive Training Centers. SpaceX is not just rockets but is into telecommunications and AI as well. "SpaceX says it operates roughly 9,600 Starlink satellites, serves around 10.3 million subscribers globally and provides connectivity services across 164 countries and territories." Its future plans include: "Orbital AI compute infrastructure, massive AI training clusters, space based data center capabilities and AI-enabled satellite networks." MC. The defensive implications of these technologies combined is unimaginable. Is all this even possible and can any industrialist in India ever dream of taking such risks? In India, Skyroot Aerospace and Agnikul Cosmos are aiming to launch satellites under 300 kg to "low-earth orbits of under 500 km from the Earth's surface." They are "also developing patented affordable rocket propulsion and 3D-printed body technologies to be able to turn rockets around at a rapid pace." Skyroot turned unicorn last month, wrote Das. "In business, a unicorn is a startup company valued at over US $1 billion which is privately owned and not listed on a share market." wikipedia. There is a yawning gap between $1 billion and $1,750 billion, so SpaceX will need some catching up. "At a time when two US AI startups Anthropic and OpenAI are heading towards public listings estimated to be worth several billion dollars," Indian founders may be "building high quality AI startups but lagging compute capacity, underdeveloped research ecosystem and slow domestic consumption are the reasons why India is trailing in AI." "India generates nearly 20% of global data but owns less than 5% of AI compute capacity." TOI. The government organized an India AI Impact Summit at Bharat Mandapam in Delhi from 16-21 February 2026.  wikipedia. In a recent podcast, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that "the summit was extremely disorganized. DH. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he "was sort of confused like when he (PM Modi) grabbed my hand and put it up, and I just wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing." TNIE. Shut up, you two. Isn't it enough that you were photographed with the great man? This was real, not artificial. And not about intelligence. For the lobotomised Bhakts.        

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