Yes, this article itself seems like a deliberate misunderstanding of the idea.

Correct ... Tesla.

I expect that, going back to the early days of Falcon 1, and being on the verge of bankruptcy, he had quite a different motivation than he has at the moment. So, yes, I’m willing to entertain the possibility that he really did dig deep into that particular subject.

Uhm, you need to recalculate, since he was pondering petabit per second. That’s a factor of 8 off from petabyte per second.

I just looked up the actual tweet and it’s even less than that. SpaceX is just responding to an RFP (that Blue Origin and Lockheed are also responding to) for the latest iteration of the existing network at Mars. The current system just takes advantage of Mars orbiters that already there. NASA would like to send…

But you think, like he does, that it’s anywhere near theoretically possible through wireless communication and hundreds/thousands of satellites??

How does that help? It buys 1 1/4 second off your tens of minutes latency, under the best of circumstances.

Petabyte per second absolutely does mean the duration of the trip per packet has to be short - it also means you have to be able to send a massive amount of data in the stream. Latency would be atrocious as well, at any speed at or slower than light. You’re talking a ping of 22m22s. That’s 1342000ms - roughly…

Musk has enough common knowledge of a subject to be able to wow most crowds. I’ll give him his ability to recall data points that have been presented to him, but this belief he “understands” it all is misplaced.

Musk isn’t dumb, he is acting dumb. The guy knows his orbital physics, for instance, which is a lot more than you or I grasp. I’m not a fan of him either, I don’t like a lot of his choices, but his IQ isn't sub 100.

Elon is clearly the founder of SpaceX, it’s not even contested. It was his idea after the Russians refused to sell him a rocket to send a terrarium to Mars, his friends like Jim Cantrell tried to talk him out of it, he put half his net worth in, etc.

Elon co-founded X.com, which became PayPal after a merger. He also founded SpaceX. I believe you're confusing SpaceX with Tesla, which he indeed was not an original founder, although an early investor

This is the most thought provoking comment (to me anyways), on Jalopnik, in years.

Might as well just use the Moon as a storage/web proxy between Earth and Mars! Store exabytes of static content up there so data doesn’t have to go between Earth and Mars directly! Brilliant!

the speed at which you can load anything is still dependent on the speed of light

Just to add, he didn’t found Tesla, either despite Tesla’s About page.

Add Tesla to that list. Musk didn’t found Tesla either; he was the money guy who threw out the founders after and bullied them via a lawsuit into making him a co-founder.

petabyte(bit)/second hasn’t anything to do with the transmission propagation rate, it has to do with the transmission bandwidth. Transmission delay has to do with the transmission propagation rate; as you noted, latency.

For both PayPal and SpaceX, his $$$ buyin agreements specified that he was to be referred to as a “founder”, even though he came along after both were operating. So, his narcissism fits right in with the incoming administration.

So we’re just realizing that Elon is dumb as a stump?