Didn’t know what time it was, the lights were low, oh-oh
I leaned back on my radio, oh-oh
Some cat was layin’ down some rock ‘n’ roll, “Lotta soul”, he said
Then the loud sound did seem to fade, ay-ay
Came back like a slow voice on a wave of phase, ay-ay
That weren’t no DJ, that was hazy cosmic jive
There’s a starman waiting in the sky
He’d like to come and meet us
But he thinks he’d blow our minds
There’s a starman waiting in the sky
He’s told us not to blow it
‘Cause he knows it’s all worthwhile
10,000 satellites & a TeraFab chip factory
Even by Elon Musk’s outsized standards last week was big. On Tuesday SpaceX launched 54 satellites, bringing the total currently in orbit to more than 10,000. And on Saturday he announced a $20 billion chip factory in Texas, a joint project between SpaceX and Tesla.
Musk is an unreasonable man.
The reasonable person adapts themselves to the world, makes an effort to fit in, to be a part of society. The unreasonable are annoyed that the world doesn’t fit their vision and so set out to adopt the world to the visions in their heads.
Here’s a perspective on the unreasonable vision of Elon Musk: Since Sputnik pierced the heavens in 1957, roughly 25,904 satellites have been launched, according to Jonathan C. McDowell’s General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects. SpaceX has launched 11,529 of those, with 10,200 currently in orbit.
In other words, SpaceX has 10,200 satellites in orbit above us right now. In the 69 years since Sputnik NASA, the Chinese space program, the Russian space program, the French Ariane program…every other launch program combined have launched 14,375.
40 percent of everything ever launched from Earth is a SpaceX satellite currently in orbit.
And then there’s the TeraFab.
The Austin facility will house equipment for logic, memory, packaging, testing, and lithography mask production in a single building in order to produce chips for Tesla's vehicles and Optimus humanoid robots, plus higher-power chips hardened for the space environment.
Musk also offered an update on the space data centers plan, including this illustrated comparison between terrestrial and space data centers:
Will all of this work? Any of it? We won’t know for years. But you must admit it is an unreasonable vision.
Comments of the Week
Lynn W Gardner on The next Spielberg is a kid with a laptop; Welcome to the Age of the Solopreneur and the Unreasonable Man: Chris, great article, you have described how difficult it is to work for visionaries. You discuss Steve Jobs whom many a volume has been written. The same could be said about Musk, Packard, Hughes, Ford, Bell, Franklin, and any other visionary across time and history. TT he common denominator that you document is vision and a drive to make the vision a reality. Again great article.
Thanks Lynn! The trouble is you can only tell the visionaries from the madmen in retrospect. The visionaries are the ones that succeed; the madmen are the ones who fail. Imagine if cancer had tragically claimed Jobs even earlier, before the iPod; he'd be another mostly forgotten Adam Osborne.
Joshua Chan The next Spielberg is a kid with a laptop; Welcome to the Age of the Solopreneur and the Unreasonable Man: Good article! I’ve been thinking about this topic quite a bit. I read a Twitter post that called this “high fidelity noise”. This post strikes me in a similar fashion.
Thanks! I read the Citrini piece, and thought about including it, but decided I wanted to dunk on the FTSG report instead. Both have the same error; they accurately chronicle the loss of current Industrial Age jobs, and then suffer from a failure of imagination. Both think that because they cannot imagine new jobs for a new age, then such jobs cannot exist. As for me? Bring on the madmen, sez I!
Perfecting Equilibrium Stories
Feola Elsewhere on the Internet
Should you buy a backup digicam?
If you love the way your camera renders should you stock a spare?
By cjfeola in Columns on Mar 19, 2026
The camera bag was old, stuffed with gear I hadn’t touched in years; massive flash guns and brackets and power grips, mostly. There was still an SFO tag hanging from the handle, from when I’d flown from Tokyo to San Francisco to get discharged from the Army
In 1987.
And in one of the pockets, treasure: An undeveloped roll of Kodachrome 64.
So treasure, buried. I’ll never know what’s on that roll, now.
Easter Eggs
My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Friday March 27 - Foto.Feola.Friday
Sunday March 29 — All your data is in a 1974 mainframe setup; why are you surprised your AI chokes on it? Driving your Pinto, looking so groovy in your pure polyester leisure suit, doing the Loco-Motion on your bench seat along with Grand Funk Railroad, your Afro so big your hair barely fit in the car…What’s that you say? Only a lunatic would be driving a Pinto in 2026, an exploding death trap that was unsafe at any speed? You wouldn’t be caught dead in a leisure suit? Polyester makes you break out in hives? 1974 is long dead and buried, and good riddance?
Then why is all your most precious data shoe-horned into a 1974 data architecture designed to run on an IBM 370 mainframe? And why do you complain when it doesn’t fit your needs any better than that leisure suit?