Because a LOT of people are missing the point:
No, Elon Musk is NOT serious about putting a million data centres into orbit. It can't work: laws of physics say "nope".
But SpaceX is expected to go public this year.
Elon is talking up his company's future prospects in front of gullible investors because he needs a growth narrative beyond Starlink, which is already priced in. Something to justify the Starship proram beyond NASA's lunar ambitions.
So it's salesman's bullshit, lies for fools.
@cstross I'd be interested in finding out if Scott Manley got anything wrong here.
His take, as I understand it, is basically (1) the physics makes it complicated but not non-doable, and (2) can't be profitable now but may well be so within the foreseeable future -- making it likely that whoever gets there first, even before it's profitable, stands to make the usual absurd amounts of money (especially if orbital access is never properly regulated) once it does become cheap enough for it to be profitable.
@jb I don't approve of capitalism occupying Earth orbit; my point was that (at least according to Manley, and what I do understand of physics and orbital mechanics) it's not implausible that what the Muskrat is doing here is actually sensible from a capitalist standpoint.
His whole existence is a grift, and he needs to be stopped, but this particular part of it seems far less of a con than (e.g.) the "cybertruck".
@woozle @jb Tough luck: all we've got in orbit today is capitalism, plus a couple of government-funded puppet shows showcasing "space science" while paying huge back-handers to corporations.
This is the reason we can't have nice things. (I prefer the term "crapitalism" to "enshittification", but you get the picture either way.)
Charlie Stross
Woozle Hypertwin
jb