SpaceX valued at just $780 billion by Morningstar, less than half its IPO target

[paulkienitz]

24. There is no way you can make the math work

so that data centers in orbit are cheaper and pay out better than ones on the ground with full environmental mitigation and respect for neighbors, unless you assume a scale so gargantuan that it's the only option. Which would tremendously escalate the risk of turning our entire fleet of low-orbit assets into shrapnel via the Kessler syndrome.

Plus the entirely speculative gamble of what good the data centers will even do us once built, and the fact that the only reason this idea is being taken seriously at all by people like Musk or Bezos or Eric Schmit is just because we're in the middle of a huge speculative bubble. Which will collapse long before the buildout can get to a scale big enough to justify needing to put it in space.

This is even dumber than the old idea of building giant solar arrays in orbit to beam down power via microwaves, when for a fraction of the cost you can produce just as many watts from ordinary solar roofs scattered wherever people live.