Elon Musk is hardly lacking for toys. He can spend the morning digging vast tunnels with Hyperloop, the afternoon launching rockets with SpaceX and spend the evening posting on his very own X social media network. Even so, there is one gadget that could still tempt Musk: Microsoft’s increasingly error-prone Xbox.
It was reported this week that the Xbox division would be axing 3,200 jobs, the equivalent of a fifth of its workforce. The company is also selling four of its game development studios. Xbox has suffered from slim profit margins, spiraling hardware costs and sluggish growth for Xbox’s Game Pass subscription service. And Xbox fans have been outraged at leaks suggesting the company may remove the disc drive in its upcoming machine. That would mean an end to the cheaper, second-hand games market. It’s a desperate attempt by Xbox to claw back some much needed cash from fans.
These machines are a vast, untapped reserve in an era when the world’s leading companies are scrabbling for chips
“Our business today is not healthy,” said Asha Sharma, who has been CEO since February. Xbox has “lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested” and management has ballooned to as many as 14 layers. Staff numbers have grown 40 percent since the release of Xbox Series X and S in November 2020, “even as our player base and playtime have declined,” Sharma explained. Xbox is in need of its very own DoGE.
Elon Musk has already shown he could do it at Twitter. Management layers need to be cut and top executives told that it’s game over. For all the whining and gnashing of teeth, Twitter became a far leaner company. Musk showed that you don’t need tens of thousands of employees to run a website.
And there is a business case for Musk buying Xbox. He already has a longstanding relationship with Nvidia, the world’s largest graphics card manufacturer run by Jensen Huang. In fact, xAI and SpaceX already own 220,000 Nvidia GPUs for training artificial intelligence. Tesla has its own chip cluster in Texas, made up another 100,000 GPUs. And xAI recently took on $12.5 billion in debt to buy more Nvidia processors. What has this got to do with Xbox?
There are currently an estimated 35 million latest-generation Xbox around the globe. Those computers are sitting idle for most of the day, while their owners are out of the house or at work. Musk could make an offer to Xbox users: let me run AI training and big data analysis on your otherwise-idle machine and you can have access to Xbox Live and free games. Xbox could be turned into a giant, distributed data center.
The total compute of all those modern Xboxes is something like 250 EFLOPs, a measure of computer operations per second. That’s vast. Together, all those Xboxes are something like 12,000 times more powerful than NASA’s top supercomputer, Athena.
Sure, turning the Xbox network into a giant distributed supercomputer is going to have its problems. It’s likely to be inefficient and the chips in these gaming computers aren’t optimized for complex mathematical modeling. But the scale of all that computing power is huge. And if anyone could pull of such a feat, it’s Musk. These machines are a vast, untapped reserve in an era when the world’s leading companies are scrabbling for chips.
A project like this has already been undertaken. The University of California, Berkeley launched SETI@home in 1999, which stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” For 21 years, until the project was shut down in 2020, SETI@home used volunteers’ personal computers to analyze radio signals. All you did was download some software from Berkeley and, while your computer was idle, it would run mathematical computations in the background.
The project had access to two million devices over its lifespan. In one day in 2009, SETI had 320,000 computers all whirring away in the name of scientific advancement. So, yes, a giant, distributed crowdsourced computer network can work. I had SETI running on my first laptop as a teenager.
There are, of course, other reasons why Musk might want Xbox. Twitter became X, Musk launched both SpaceX and the Tesla Model X, while giving one of his sons the name X Æ A-12. He loves the letter X. And in contrast to Sharma, Musk is also a keen gamer. In fact, he started in the world of business as a game developer. At the age of 12, Musk made Blastar, described as a mix between Space Invaders and Asteroid. He sold the code to a computer magazine for $500 in 1984.
Xbox could be bought for a fraction of Musk’s net worth. It’s difficult to determine the spin out value of Xbox as a stand-alone company but one industry analyst has put it at around $100 billion, so a tenth of Musk’s current wealth. I would much rather Musk focus on conquering space and building self-driving cars than playing video games. But if he owned Xbox, he could do both.
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