I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m utterly exhausted by the non-stop discussion of politics, a habit that is profoundly soul-sucking and the antithesis of the way any human should want to spend their day. Never mind their life. I mean really. When was the last time anyone came away from a political discussion feeling energized and wholesome? No, you want to punch something. Even sitting with people who are in complete political harmony, it’s bad news; the conversation often tends to be dominated by the audacious stupidity of the other side. Making it worse, a certain slice of humanity works very hard to make everything political, so discussions about weather or holidays or business always seem to wind up in that same Sunday morning gutter.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Some people just want to talk positive things, about building stuff. Lead me to ‘em. Building is something to strive for, the opposite of politics. It doesn’t matter what you are building…building is making stuff, or making stuff better. It is blueprints and construction and growth, but it is also making music, writing books, building or rebuilding people’s shattered lives.
If one talks about building stuff in this current point in time, there is no way that Elon Musk/Tesla/SpaceX can be avoided. True, Musk did immerse himself in politics, and most recently appeared to stand in the way of Ukraine’s war effort, which is sad news indeed. But the latter is murky, as Musk has strongly supported Ukraine in the past, it is far less murky to say that Musk’s Starlink technology has been incredibly beneficial to Ukrainian fighting forces. The waters are not clear.
But to hell with all that. Like I said at the outset, we can choose to talk about anything; we can choose to talk about disturbing things like murder or politics, or we can choose to talk about building. The negative energy of political wrangling seems mutually exclusive with the positive energy of building, so let’s turn one dial to zero and the other to eleven. To do that in 2026 means talking about what Musk and his teams are up to in the constructive sense, and not the political one. Even if you feel strongly about it, allow yourself the luxury of parking the politics, because the constructive side is truly something to behold.
As a worker in the hydrocarbon industry, I’m not supposed to like Musk at all, in theory, because he developed gasoline-substitute EVs, which was fodder for small minds that hold big theories that anyone in the hydrocarbon industry works in devious ways to promote use of hydrocarbon products. In other words, anyone involved in the hydrocarbon industry theoretically could not possibly be a fan of Musk’s businesses, because one of his first mega-successes was Tesla, a company that Musk envisioned destroying all gasoline consumption and thereby mortally wounding the oil industry.
Note use of the word ‘thereby’ – Musk’s goal was not to mortally wounding the oil industry; his goal was to build EVs when everyone told him it couldn’t be done economically and at scale. He genuinely believed (and believes) that electric power is the way to go; he doesn’t set out to undercut competitors, he set out to build something better. That is the spirit of the builder, and it is the same spirit that allows someone working in the oil patch to admire someone that created a product that could have put his business out of business.
Anyway, on to the good stuff. The crux of what Musk is working to construct now has to with data centres, a now-contentious topic. People fear that monolithic grey humming buildings will destroy life as we know it.
As with politics, the conversation tends to the functional equivalent of the lowest common denominator; people want to talk about the worst possible harm. We’ll all lose our jobs. Data centres will consume all the water and drive power bills through the roof. Oy vey, what a way to live. Nothing is easier than ‘going there’, to envision all the bad things that can happen. Why go for a drive with all the bad drivers. Can’t eat pizza because of the health effects. Crime is so bad I need to bar all my windows. EAHHH the sun, don’t let it hit me, skin cancer! That condition is itself a poor health condition, because life is short, anything can happen, and it is poison to only allow the bad stuff into consciousness.
So let’s dive into the good stuff, starting small and working up to the magnitude of what Musk is up to.
You like scrubbing toilets? Vacuuming? Maybe three percent will say yes, and God bless ya, have at it. Most will say no. So in the good news column, Tau Robotics is a San Francisco based company that has launched a cleaning company using humanoid robots. They vacuum, mop, wipe counters, and yes clean toilets, for 30 bucks an hour. As robots get cheaper, that cost will drop and drop until it is inconsequential (more on that certainty in a second).
Will cleaners and janitors lose jobs? Undoubtedly, yes. Will humanity be better off if robots clean everything all the time? If swarms of them come out at night to de-filth streets, will we be better off for that? How about airports? How about if we could have public washrooms all over the place without them descending into something that, as recovering fraudulent ex-lawyer Jeff Winger said in Communities, “You don’t sit on a toilet like that until you’ve left the material world behind…”
House-cleaning robotics are the tip of the iceberg. Robots show immense promise for surgery, which could be performed anywhere in the world, not where the best surgeons are. Musk has even created Neuralink, brain implants that are allowing people to regain functionality that traditional medicine had no hope of fixing.
Or let’s talk about habitats for humanity. Imagine a fleet of robots showing up to build a house with a fleet of 3D materials printers and the ability to read blueprints for plumbing and everything else, robots that could work 24/7 (a side issue is that even today the regulatory side of everything generally has a longer timeline than actual construction, and therefore is among the biggest delimiters on solving problems like housing…but that is another topic entirely).
On to Musk-world. Musk is pursuing a gigantic convergence of AI, data centres, rocketry/spacecraft, self-driving cars, and robotics, via a system that can deliver and coordinate it all. He is seeking to build his own chips because chips are a bottleneck, just as one arm of his empire seeks to build gas turbine blades because they are the bottleneck in bringing on new power supplies. Platforms like X and data-gathering machines like Tesla cars provide immense insight into traffic and weather information, into humanity, and where they stop for junk food. All those sensors that allow autonomous driving in a Tesla are also data gathering tools, and so what is in play here is an awful lot of data.
The convergence recognizes that compute power for such data volumes, and AI, is a bottleneck; that electrical grids cannot handle the coming wave of power demand from data centres, and power generating equipment cannot be build rapidly enough for what we are apparently going to need in society.
So Musk tackles the bottlenecks, no matter how big. The Terafab facility is designed to ultimately produce 1,000 gigawatts (or 1 Terawatt, hence…the name) of computing capacity, which is approximately 30 times current global capacity. The space angle is relevant to Musk’s convergence, because he sees space as the only possible hosting grounds for all the data processing he (and many others) envision. So he is building rockets with payloads that will dwarf anything ever before sent into space, and he is designing the rockets to take payloads day after day, not waiting a year between launches. Space development has been hindered by the cost of transporting equipment into space, and so naturally Musk has tackled that part. In the year 2000, it cost roughly $10-18,000 per kilogram to take equipment into space; Musk, with his reusable SpaceX rockets, hopes to bring that to around $100/kg by 2027.
Some people, of course, say he won’t succeed. Jensen Huang, recently honeypotted Nvidia CEO, says Musk’s vision of building so many chips is a “near impossibility”, which sounds remarkably similar to what the auto industry said when Musk started rolling out EVs.
Musk says a lot of crazy stuff, both dubious aspirational targets and odd political musings at times, but as mentioned at the outset, the sheer veracity of his ability to build things makes those shortcomings pale in comparison.
Two things are pertinent to the above, or worthwhile conclusions to draw. One is that that is what real building looks like, real progress, real achievement, and it is something to behold because of what it could mean for humanity. This isn’t the world’s biggest Walmart. It is concrete action, with the best talent that can be found relentlessly thrown against problems until the issues are resolved.
The second item of interest is to understand that achievements can and should be appreciated even if the proponent’s political alignments are not entirely aligned with one’s own. Think about that for a minute. If people only supported stuff built by people that think exactly like they do on every major issue, on every topical mainstream cultural issue, would anyone support anything at all? China is a communist dictatorship that developed in large part on IP stolen from JVs, but does that negate the fact that they are building some truly incredible stuff? I like gunk on my shoe more than I like communism, and yet there is no denying that the Chongqing rail station in China is a magnificent structure, constructed in an unbelievably short time frame (recently praised here on this very site.
It is also true that the path is not always smooth or painless. Occupations do disappear. Horseshoe makers and cobblers and everything else to do with a horse-centric system are no longer with us, which was sad at the time for those horseshoe makers, but are we not better off? When revolutionary technology appears, we can see there will be change, but we can’t envision it perfectly. In general, new technology takes off like wildfire when it is benefitting humans the most. So that is a very real possible outcome, not just the negative side.
We have great things – houses, vacations, hospitals, cars, supermarkets, books, music – because someone built them. Humans do the building. The state can only build by taking proceeds of what individuals built in their own lives. Humans build, then government taxes/takes. But whatever. Building stuff makes life worthwhile. It is easy to be bedazzled by the mega-builders, but there is no reason the same spirit can’t run through every one of us, no matter how old or how fearful.
Go build something. It feels great.
The holidays are nearly here. Show them you love them by purchasing The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity. Read the energy story written for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Email Terry here.