404 Media

2026-02-05 16:37:23

This SpaceX Situation: Not Good!

In 2015, after reading a book about how the telegraph created a sort of proto-internet that helped make various robber barons rich and powerful, I wrote an article about Elon Musk that, a decade later, feels both very embarrassing and somewhat prophetic. Musk and SpaceX had just announced a plan to launch a constellation of low-earth orbit, internet-providing satellites.

I saw this at the time as a step toward a kind of everything company. SpaceX was working on reusable rockets that would drastically lower the cost of flying things to space, and I imagined at the time that, if successful, being able to fly things to space for a far lower cost than his competitors would give Musk incredible power and wealth. This was in part because of SpaceX’s potential ability to become a telecom company in addition to a space launch company.

“If he can successfully develop the reusable launch vehicles, that gives him a tremendous dominance over the mode of getting to space. Once you can do it relatively cheaply and in high volume, instead of launching five or six times a year, you’re launching [and] putting stuff into orbit once a week. That’s the hard part,” Marco Caceres, a space industry analyst, told me at the time. “All the other stuff is really dessert, in a way. It’s the satellites, the services that’ll make you the real money.” SpaceX said at the time that Starlink would have 4,000 satellites. Today, it has more than 9,000 satellites, and the majority of all satellites in space have been launched by SpaceX and are owned by SpaceX.

I imagined a world in which SpaceX essentially became a telecom company in addition to being a space company, and the type of power that would give Musk. A decade later, at least this part is more or less coming to pass. SpaceX is a company that has been extremely boosted by tax breaks, subsidies, and government contracts. It also has become critical, quasi-governmental infrastructure not just for the United States but for companies around the world. And Starlink itself now essentially has a monopoly on fast internet access in rural areas, on boats, in conflict areas, and, increasingly, on airplanes. Starlink is very much a real thing—an international flight I was on recently had free Starlink internet and it felt like half of the plane spent most of the flight on video calls.

My article from 2015 is full of Musk boosterism that makes me embarrassed now, and Musk promises things every five minutes that are either wildly overhyped by the media, never happen, or happen on much longer timescales than expected. But the article was directionally accurate: SpaceX figured out how to launch rockets routinely and inexpensively, and it is now wildly powerful because of this. Starlink exists because it is easy for SpaceX to put satellites in space, and Musk’s unfettered access to low-Earth orbit has allowed him to literally dominate a space (sorry) that should be shared by all of humanity.

SpaceX has always been a political project, one in which Musk seeks to colonize space, expand his bloodline, and/or become god emperor of the universe. It is perhaps his most political project. And yet, of his companies, it has flown under the radar as an explicitly political project because Musk has been so goddamned annoying, destructive, and fascistic on X and within the federal government. SpaceX, meanwhile, has always been the most competently run of his companies, and is one that under Gwynne Shotwell’s leadership had, til now, largely not been fucked with by Musk in the ways that Tesla, Twitter, and xAI have been.

That’s not to say Musk hasn’t meddled at all: He ordered the shutdown of Starlink in Ukraine in the early days of Russia’s war there, and literally this week the company announced he would crack down on Russia’s use of Starlink for drones. That this company and this man have this power at all highlights my point: Starlink, and SpaceX, have become geopolitically important in ways that most people have not thought about, that we have not grappled with, and that the Trump administration is almost definitely not going to do anything about.

And so it feels both important and quite alarming that SpaceX is acquiring xAI in what appears to be a highly complex financial scheme that I cannot even begin to pretend to understand. Musk’s announcement of this deal, which appears to have been the result of a protracted “negotiation” between himself, is batshit crazy, first of all: “SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!”

Musk goes on to say that SpaceX and xAI will launch “a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers,” and signs off “thank you for everything you have done and will do for the light cone of consciousness.”

There are many reasons that “AI data centers in space” may be a pipe dream and may not happen, but what he is proposing is a magnitude of space junk that no other company could plausibly promise to launch. Data centers or not, SpaceX is now dominating low-Earth orbit in a way no other company or country has. While Musk has been gutting the federal government, interfering in elections, allowing people to generate CSAM, engaging in white supremacy, planning trips to Epstein’s island, implanting chips into people’s brains, siphoning off taxpayer money to build ridiculous tunnels, giving his sperm to whoever will take it, turning his cars into experimental robot taxis, and pretending to build humanoid robots, SpaceX has somewhat (?) quietly colonized and dominated low earth orbit.

Musk has taken this space for his own use, concerns about light pollution, satellite collisions, and telecom monopolies be damned. This has always been concerning, but explicitly intertwining the aspirations and fate of SpaceX with Musk’s CSAM generating social media website, his AI bullshit machines, and his right wing political project is horrifying and monopolistic. What happens next, I have no idea.

Starlink and Astronomers Are in a Light Pollution Standoff

Satellite streaks are ruining astronomical images. Can scientists and space companies find solutions before it’s too late?

^{Emma R. Hasson (Scientific American)}

404 Media

2026-01-30 21:26:56

Musk to Epstein: ‘What Day/Night Will Be the Wildest Party on Your Island?’

Here is an email that Elon Musk, current world’s richest man and owner of a gigantic social media network that generated child sexual abuse material on demand, sent to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on November 11, 2012: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”

At first glance, the latest Department of Justice dump of Epstein documents is at least as horrifying as any of the dumps that came previously. Whether or not—and most likely not—any consequences of any sort come for any of the people who interacted with or were friends with the notorious child sexual abuser, the documents are depraved and continue to show that Musk and many other rich and powerful people have been lying about their relationships with Epstein for years.

In September, Musk tweeted “this is false” in response to a Forbes article based on previously released documents that stated he “planned a trip to Epstein’s private island.” He also wrote “Epstein tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED.” Musk had previously been named on Epstein’s calendar as being slated to visit Epstein’s island in 2014.

The emails released Friday show without a doubt that Musk, at the very least, “planned” a trip to Epstein’s island. They also show that Epstein asked Musk if SolarCity, his solar power startup that was eventually folded into Tesla, could electrify the island or his New Mexico ranch.

The newly released documents show that Musk emailed with Epstein over the course of more than a year. In a December 2013 thread called “Christmas and New Year’s,” Musk wrote “Will be in the BVI [British Virgin Islands]/St Bart’s area over the holidays. Is there a good time to visit?”

“I will send heli for you,” Epstein responded. “Thanks,” Musk answered.

“Actually, I could fly back early on the 3rd. We will be in St Bart’s. When should we head to your island on the 2nd?,” Musk said in a follow-up email.

In October 2012, Musk emailed Epstein and said “The world needs more romance […] Talulah [Musk’s second wife] and I are headed to St. Barth’s at the end of the year. I assume you will most likely be on your island?”

Epstein eventually responded in November and offered to send Musk as helicopter: “how many people will you be for the heli to island,” Epstein wrote.

“Probably just Talulah and me,” Musk responded. “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”

Another thread between Epstein and Musk was about providing power to two of Epstein’s properties: “is there any one at Solar City that my guys can talk to about electrifying the caribean [sic] island? Or the New Mexico ranch,” Epstein wrote. “Are we in New Mexico?” Musk wrote, adding a colleague to the thread.

These emails are hitting at a time where there is quite a lot going on in the world, and Musk, Donald Trump, and the current class of people in political power have shown that they will suffer very little from essentially any political scandal. And yet, these emails show in black and white that Musk has been lying about his relationship with Epstein, and that’s worth documenting.

Epstein calendar released by Democrats mentions Elon Musk, who denies visiting his island

A copy of Jeffrey Epstein’s daily schedules released Friday by House Democrats stated that Elon Musk was tentatively expected to visit Epstein’s private island in December 2014

^{David Ingram (NBC News)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 16:56:04

Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human

I woke up restless and kind of hungover Sunday morning at 6 am and opened Reddit. Somewhere near the top was a post called “TIL in 2002 a cave diver committed suicide by stabbing himself during a cave diving trip near Split, Croatia. Due to the nature of his death, it was initially investigated as a homicide, but it was later revealed that he had done it while lost in the underwater cave to avoid the pain of drowning.” The post linked to a Wikipedia page called “List of unusual deaths in the 21st century.” I spent the next two hours falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, clicking through all manner of horrifying and difficult-to-imagine ways to die.

A day later, I saw that Depths of Wikipedia, the incredible social media account run by Annie Rauwerda, had noted the entirely unsurprising fact that, behind the scenes, there had been robust conversation and debate by Wikipedia editors as to exactly what constitutes an “unusual” death, and that several previously listed “unusual” deaths had been deleted from the list for not being weird enough. For example: People who had been speared to death with beach umbrellas are “no longer an unusual or unique occurrence”; “hippos are extremely dangerous and very aggressive and there is nothing unusual about hippos killing people”; “mysterious circumstances doesn’t mean her death itself was unusual.” These are the types of edits and conversations that have collectively happened billions of times that make Wikipedia what it is, and which make it so human, so interesting, so useful.

recently discovered that wikipedia volunteers have a hilariously high bar for what constitutes "unusual death"
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-10-27T12:38:42.573Z

Wednesday, as part of his ongoing war against Wikipedia because he does not like his page, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a fully AI-generated “encyclopedia” that serves no one and nothing other than the ego of the world’s richest man. As others have already pointed out, Grokipedia seeks to be a right wing, anti-woke Wikipedia competitor. But to even call it a Wikipedia competitor is to give the half-assed project too much credit. It is not a Wikipedia “competitor” at all. It is a fully robotic, heartless regurgitation machine that cynically and indiscriminately sucks up the work of humanity to serve the interests, protect the ego, amplify the viewpoints, and further enrich the world’s wealthiest man. It is a totem of what Wikipedia could and would become if you were to strip all the humans out and hand it over to a robot; in that sense, Grokipedia is a useful warning because of the constant pressure and attacks by AI slop purveyors to push AI-generated content into Wikipedia. And it is only getting attention, of course, because Elon Musk does represent an actual threat to Wikipedia through his political power, wealth, and obsession with the website, as well as the fact that he owns a huge social media platform.

One needs only spend a few minutes clicking around the launch version of Grokipedia to understand that it lacks the human touch that makes Wikipedia such a valuable resource. Besides often having a conservative slant and having the general hallmarks of AI writing, Grokipedia pages are overly long, poorly and confusingly organized, have no internal linking, have no photos, and are generally not written in a way that makes any sense. There is zero insight into how any of the articles were generated, how information was obtained and ordered, any edits that were made, no version history, etc. Grokipedia is, literally, simply a single black box LLM’s version of an encyclopedia. There is a reason Wikipedia editors are called “editors” and it’s because writing a useful encyclopedia entry does not mean “putting down random facts in no discernible order.” To use an example I noticed from simply clicking around: The list of “notable people” in the Grokipedia entry for Baltimore begins with a disordered list of recent mayors, perhaps the least interesting but lowest hanging fruit type of data scraping about a place that could be done.

On even the lowest of stakes Wikipedia pages, real humans with real taste and real thoughts and real perspectives discuss and debate the types of information that should be included in any given article, in what order it should be presented, and the specific language that should be used. They do this under a framework of byzantine rules that have been battle tested and debated through millions of edit wars, virtual community meetings, talk page discussions, conference meetings, inscrutable listservs which themselves have been informed by Wikimedia’s “mission statement,” the “Wikimedia values,” its “founding principles” and policies and guidelines and tons of other stated and unstated rules, norms, processes and procedures. All of this behind-the-scenes legwork is essentially invisible to the user but is very serious business to the human editors building and protecting Wikipedia and its related projects (the high cultural barrier to entry for editors is also why it is difficult to find new editors for Wikipedia, and is something that the Wikipedia community is always discussing how they can fix without ruining the project). Any given Wikipedia page has been stress tested by actual humans who are discussing, for example, whether it’s actually that unusual to get speared to death by a beach umbrella.

Grokipedia, meanwhile, looks like what you would get if you told an LLM to go make an anti-woke encyclopedia, which is essentially exactly what Elon Musk did.

As LLMs tend to do, some pages on Grokipedia leak part of its instructions. For example, a Grokipedia page on “Spanish Wikipedia” notes “Wait, no, can’t cite Wiki,” indicating that Grokipedia has been programmed to not link to Wikipedia. That entry does cite Wikimedia pages anyway, but in the “sources,” those pages are not actually hyperlinked:

I have no doubt that Grokipedia will fail, like other attempts to “compete” with Wikipedia or build an “alternative” to Wikipedia, the likes of which no one has heard of because the attempts were all so laughable and poorly participated in that they died almost immediately. Grokipedia isn’t really a competitor at all, because it is everything that Wikipedia is not: It is not an encyclopedia, it is not transparent, it is not human, it is not a nonprofit, it is not collaborative or crowdsourced, in fact, it is not really edited at all. It is true that Wikipedia is under attack from both powerful political figures, the proliferation of AI, and related structural changes to discoverability and linking on the internet like AI summaries and knowledge panels. But Wikipedia has proven itself to be incredibly resilient because it is a project that specifically leans into the shared wisdom and collaboration of humanity, our shared weirdness and ways of processing information. That is something that an LLM will never be able to compete with.

Wikipedia Prepares for 'Increase in Threats' to US Editors From Musk and His Allies

The Wikimedia Foundation says it will likely roll out features previously used to protect editors in authoritarian countries more widely.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}