Comment by wand3r
15 hours ago
Yeah, I really hate this revisionism of Elon as an extremely wealthy apartheid emerald mine heir who was a dumb guy who happened to get lucky at paypal and then stole all his money from the government while operating a car and rocket company. There is plenty to criticize about him, but SpaceX dramatically decreased cost to orbit which had reliance on Russian technology at the time.
> extremely wealthy apartheid emerald mine heir who was a dumb guy who happened to get lucky at paypal and then stole all his money from the government while operating a car and rocket company.
> SpaceX dramatically decreased cost to orbit which had reliance on Russian technology at the time.
Both can be (and are) true at the same time. Elon hired/partnered the right people and didn't have capacity to mess all the companies he owned into oblivion. His main skill is bullshiting investors, the government and the public.
Musk was raised affluent in apartheid-era South Africa, his father had some connection to Zambian emerald trading/mining, and Musk's companies have benefited enormously from public contracts and policy. He's not stupid.
Musk has benefited enormously from public contracts and policy, but all the questionable ones are in Tesla (and especially originally solarcity, but that got folded into Tesla).
The government contracts that made SpaceX were all open bid, where SpaceX bid an better solution than anything that any of the established companies did, at literally half the price. Falcon 9 was a massive gift to the US government, in that it drove the entire industry to halve the prices they extracted from the government. Dragon was just as good.
That they also built a profitable launch company out of it just highlights how much of an outlier SpaceX is. They sold the US government a dollar for fifty cents, made a profit doing it, and ended up driving half the rockets already flying out of the business.
He benefits enormously from the government but then acts like he doesn’t.
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