Comment by TheDong
21 hours ago
> Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
Elon musk has a history of making improbable-sounding promises (buy a tesla now, by 2018 it will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep, humanoid robots, hyperloops).
The majority of these promises have sounded cool enough to enough people that the stock associated with him (TSLA) has made people literal millionaires just by holding onto the stock, and more and more people have bought in and thus have a financial interest in Musk's ventures being seen in a good light (since TSLA stock does not go up or down based on tesla's performance, it goes up or down based on the vibes of elon musk. It is not a car company stock, it is an elon vibes check).
The thing he's saying now pattern matches to be pretty similar, and so given Musk's goal is to gain money, and he gains money by TSLA and SpaceX stock going up, this makes perfect sense as a thing to say and even make minor motions towards in order to make him richer.
People will support it too since it pattern matches with the thing prior TSLA holders got rich off of, and so people will want to keep the musk vibes high so that their own $tsla holdings go to the moon.
Make sense now?
The story here is even simpler. SpaceX is going public this year. Elon made a monumentally shitty investment in Twitter and then poured a stupid amount of money into xAI at the peak of the cycle. By having SpaceX buy xAI, he gets to swap worthless shares in that company for more SpaceX liquidity. Simple as that.
Exactly, and there needs to be some economic justification for a giant rocket. There is no money to be made by going to Mars, and AI data centers in space could attract investors (who are just riding the data center hype).
> I data centers in space could attract investors (who are just riding the data center hype).
I find this to be the most obvious game plan here. Makes total sense from financial engineering point of view.
You _might_ get to develop nice tech/IP to enable other space based businesses at the same time. "we sold them on X but delivered Y". So it's a bit of a hail mary, but makes total sense to me if you want to have a large budget for inventing the future.
Once you can demonstrate even a fraction of this capability of operations ... I think you can sell a "space dominance" offering to Pentagon for example and just keep pedaling.
"We are going to build the perfect weapon" does not necessarily entice as large engineer population as "we are going to Star Trek".
Another thing - if Moon is going to be a thing, then _properties on Moon_ are going to be a thing.
In theories of value in post-ai societies scarce assets like land are going to become more valuable. So it's a long term plan that makes sense if you believe Moon will be a realestate market.
Really seems silly to think that the guy with $800 billion is spending most of his time maximizing his money.
Doesn't it just make sense though? How else would he have gotten 800 billion dollars?
Ah, this old fallacy. There are myriad examples of the rich striving to be richer and the powerful fighting to gain even more power. Why would it be any different with Musk? If anything I suspect (this is absolutely an unverifiable opinion; I am not stating it as fact) that Musk's driving force is to become the first trillionaire.
Welcome to billionares. If they weren't obsessed with "number go up" over any other consideration, they wouldn't be billionares.
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He probably have 700 billion in loans and need to pay rent
What’s silly is a bunch of so-called intelligent entrepreneurs and tech insiders twisting themselves into a pretzel coming up with reasons why this or that won’t work, by the guy who keeps doing the impossible
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Yeah, but landing a rocket backwards also sounded very improbable to me, yet it looks pretty cool now.
Also people made fun of tesla that it will never be able to compete with the big carmakers. Now I would rather have some stocks in tesla than holding on to volkswagen.
I wouldn’t be so sure about Tesla stock. Tesla has only weathered 1 market downturn cycle and that was when it was a very different company. The company has thus far had access to plentiful capital since the Model S started being delivered.
Famous investors like to repeat the quote that “when the tide goes out, that’s when we find out who’s wearing no pants.” When Tesla actually weathers its first market downturn is when we find out how much investors interest is maintained When investment dollars are scarce.
Oh no! He promised my car would be self driving in 2018 but it took until 2026 before that was true.
How dare he not have accurately predicted when one of the hardest technical problems in history is solved?
“At SpaceX we specialize in making the impossible merely late.” -Elon