Musk truly believes that billionaires are the master race. Wow.
Well, if we’re so smart why ain’t we rich?
Morals, scruples, too much empathy in general…
I’d just like to say that I am all in favor of a bunch of billionaires with no technical expertise spending two years together in a spaceship the size of a minivan designed by a guy whose rockets regularly blow up and his cars spontaneously combust.
A fly-by of Mars that would mean years spent in a tin can hurtling through space? I’m not sure if I can think of anything more spectacularly pointless.
You have obviously never seen the reality show “Big Brother”.
Ratings would be “yuge”… until it gets cancelled, leaving several extremely antagonistic former celebrity astronauts still stuck in a tiny metal cylinder all together, still a long way from Mars.
Q: What do you call a dozen billionaires rocketed towards Mars?
A: A good start.
Baa-dum tish! I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.
I’ll believe that SpaceX are making progress towards a real Mars mission when they demonstrate a galley and food storage solution that is guaranteed to work for the duration. Without any need for maintenance or repair. Big rockets are pointless if all you do is send desiccated corpses on a Mars flyby.
Depends who the corpses are.
Just pack a few thousand cans of tuna.
We could call it Golgafrinchan Ark B!
That’s the Simpsons scene I’ve never really got because I don’t understand most of the American cultural references. (because I don’t know most of the people and their personalities that appear)
They’re all B-listers or has-beens, which clues the Simpsons in to the fact that those selected for the ship were not deemed necessary for the Mars colony.
Ah, thanks for the explanantion.
You’re welcome! 
Elon retweets, action ensues. Attempted murder.
Either this is the most spectacular scam ever to take place in recorded history, or Google is certain that AI is the foundation of the entire future global economy.
If nothing else, the Starship program can now be funded as Musk’s hobby out of pocket change.
Or neither.
Prices for guaranteed compute capacity are incredibly high but companies like Google are almost assured of using it and are near capacity out on their own (rates on Google Cloud are ridiculous right now) without the ability to scale up quickly. That last part is critical. Even big tech companies are having issues quickly scaling up their compute capacity due to hardware shortages. They can’t build their own capacity at that scale even if they offered 10 times the amount they’ll be paying SpaceX. Supply meet Demand.
Knowing they have that capacity for the next 32 months has its own value even if there isn’t as much of a boom in AI.
To the extent there may be a scam, it is the ability of SpaceX to provide the entirety of that capacity. But if they can’t, the contract allows Google to cancel entirely and/or pay reduced rates.
Meanwhile, Elon is cheerleading a pogrom in Belfast.