Sure, let’s smoosh SpaceX and Tesla together, who cares

Oh sure, SpaceX’s credit risk is pretty high because it’s about to borrow another $40 billion to spend on Nvidia chips, but who cares about that? SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss a merger! The degree to which you find this merger compelling likely has to do with the degree to which you believe Elon Musk about wanting to go to Mars, or “spread the light of consciousness,” as he put it in this week’s SpaceX earnings call (and earlier S-1). Now, a reasonably informed person knows that we don’t have the technology — or, frankly, even the raw information to build the technology — in order to support human life in space. So that means robots. But a lag between Earth and the Moon or Mars makes for difficulty in controlling the robots. So having artificially intelligent robots who can make decisions on their own with minimal supervision from Earth is the next sci-fi logic step. “There’s a lot to be gained from cooperating on developing superintelligence software.” If you believe Musk’s story, the technology we are talking about is being developed through self-driving cars (Tesla), LLMs (SpaceX), and humanoid robots (Tesla), all of which require…