Comment by hersko
2 days ago
Thank goodness for billionaires.
There's a good case to be made that if it weren't for the likes of Musk and Bezos we'd still be stuck with the likes of ULA.
They are literally pulling us into the future and i'm all for it.
It actually is a feature of capitalism. Envy can blind though.
Yes thank you billionaires, if you hadn't vacuumed the wealth of a nation this could have been a government agency success. Why should we all benefit when one man can?
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Musk and Bezos have generated insane amounts of wealth for the American economy. They're not hoarding dollar bills in some vault like Scrooge McDuck lol.
No indeed, it is not a zero-sum game, billionaires like Musk and Bezos have more money than Scrooge McDuck [0], the cartoon version of Greed. While their share of the global wealth is increasing by each year
"The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population, reveals a new Oxfam report today." Jan 16, 2023 [1]
[0] https://www.benzinga.com/news/21/11/23829868/elon-musk-is-ev... [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-bag-nearly...
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The sums spent on this are trivial to governments. California HSR costs much more than bringing a rocket to life. The annual cost of dialysis to the American government is many times what SpaceX or Blue Origin costs.
Any number of nations' governments could do this in a wealth perspective. And none have.
Of course they haven’t, how can they afford to compete with private companies? We’ve all decided that taxes are bad, there’s no money in a govt position.
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There are billionaires all over the world who haven’t built successful space companies. The key ingredient is the government funding which has made the US space industry possible, such as building the launch pads, subsidizing hundreds of companies which build specialized parts, creating the GPS network required to track launches, etc.
Maybe thank the taxpayers instead?
Totally worth the exploitation, amirite?? /s
(You do realize we did this before without them, right?)
No nation has a done what spacex has.
Can you explain how i am exploited? I use Amazon products daily (as do you), why shouldn't i be thankful to Bezos? He has made my life tangibly better.
I really don't care how many shares of Amazon he has and what the current share price is.
I guess it would presuppose some solidarity with the workers at Amazon
At a glance: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/12/study-amazon-workers-serious...
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-10-25/pain-exhau...
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Billionaires simply cannot exist without exploitation somewhere (though most often throughout the system that enriched them.)
This isn't even controversial.
Many simply choose to think it's acceptable, even preferable, through whatever twisted justifications.