Leah Feiger: Talking about him. Yes. Absolutely.

Brian Barrett: Yes. It’s just the web. It fills this web.

Leah Feiger: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, these are the tech titans.

Brian Barrett: Yes. As recently as 2019, I think some of these people were actively in contact.

Leah Feiger: Wow. So speaking of Elon, he’s also in the news this week for something different, aka rolling xAI at SpaceX, officially creating the world’s most valuable private company. We need to talk about that.

Brian Barrett: Yes. And I know you love… It combines your two favorite things.

Leah Feiger: Oh, yes. Absolutely.

Brian Barrett: AI and Elon Musk.

Leah Feiger: Uh-huh.

Brian Barrett: Leah, may I also interest you in a potential third favorite item?

Leah Feiger: Oh, I swear, Brian.

Brian Barrett: Can I interest you in space data centers?

Leah Feiger: So this is what he promised, right?

Brian Barrett: Yes.

Leah Feiger: I am very interested in data centers.

Brian Barrett: Oh, good.

Leah Feiger: Molly Taft, our amazing climate reporter at the science desk, absolutely drove home to me how important it is to engage with them. I hate them, but I am very interested in them. So he wants to build a data center in space. What does that mean? What is the terrestrial solution? Please explain all these things.

Brian Barrett: Well, basically, yes. Hence Elon Musk’s pitch for merging SpaceX and xAI. And just to back up for a second, SpaceX is the most mainstream, non-controversial Elon Musk company, maybe.

Leah Feiger: This is his rocket company.

Brian Barrett: Yes. This is his rocket company. They basically privatized NASA, partly because NASA had stopped. Although…

Leah Feiger: No.

Brian Barrett: The future of US space really depends on SpaceX in many ways.

Leah Feiger: If Jeff Bezos is listening to this podcast, he has a real—

Brian Barrett: Sorry, Blue Origin. Yes. Oh, gosh.

Leah Feiger: Internal.

Brian Barrett: Terrible day. Blue Origin is also there. So on the one hand, you have this kind of future of space travel in the US, and on the other hand you have xAI, which is Elon Musk’s AI company that continues to undress women without consent.

Leah Feiger: And so is X, formerly known as Twitter.

Brian Barrett: Yes. And now they all become the same thing.

Leah Feiger: Former Twitter employees, did they make money from it? What happened? How are all these companies now the same thing? None of these are related to each other except Elon Musk.

Brian Barrett: So he argues differently. And so the case he’s going to make is that in order for AI to get to where it needs to be, wherever that is—faster undressing of more women—in order for it to get there, there really isn’t enough energy on Earth to do that. So what you have to do is you have to go out into space and use the energy of the sun to use the AI. And who is so good at going out into space and using things? SpaceX.