Wandering Adventure Party

@zarfeblong I think it's the other way around. SpaceX IPO as-is would be fine, a lot of people want to buy it, they have actual tech, product and revenue. Meanwhile xAI is, even by AI company standards, a piece of shit burning through money and recently also losing quite a few top people with not that much to show for it.

Musk would still like his AI though, so the idea is to have people who want to buy SpaceX subsidize xAI. He is also astroturfing the numbers and pulling strings to get the SpaceX+xAI monstrosity into one of the big indexes so index funds would effectively prop up the price. See yesterday's piece on Alphaville: https://www.ft.com/content/59adbe42-ca30-47f3-9cda-5415945e9368 (registration probably required) @cstross

@cstross To be fair I think "AI translation is fine" is largely an extension of the "English gets you by everywhere because globalization" pathology pushed by European governments and businesses for cost-saving and/or neoliberal-ideology reasons for several decades.

A friend works for an export-promotion agency that helps European companies establish a presence in East Asian countries, and has had quite a few stories to tell about SMEs losing their shirts going in on their own with that attitude, even in the supposedly-highly-law-abiding democracies.

There's a cottage industry of dudes whose only skill is to speak fluent English with American sports idioms that the CEO class loves. They wine and dine idiot managers coming over who have no idea about local language/markets/customs, throw in sports talk to convince them that they are huge players in local business networks and getting the furriner's products to market is going to be a slam dunk, feed glowing fake reports to string along the current victim, and then use the consulting fees to acquire new marks.