Given it's Musk and his stated primary life goal, the most ridiculous aspect of the Twitter debacle for him, is: not only of course did he overpay for Twitter by at least 2x; not only is his net worth going to contract as Tesla's stock compresses (such that the poor Twitter decision is going to be that much more painful in relation to his overall wealth); but the $40x billion could have probably paid for getting Starship to Mars. He's not going to be as rich in the future as he was in that moment, and he'll be relentlessly mocked for the context as his ship takes on water (eg when he's worth $60-$80 billion and spent $44 billion buying Twitter and SpaceX needs $10+ billion infused into it to keep pursuing Mars).
It appears to be working/progressing properly so far (and quite rapidly compared to norms in the industry), including the Raptor engines. I doubt that's it.
Musk has very obviously poor impulse control. Someone more contained, patient, less impulsive, would have waited and taken a more strategic approach to acquiring Twitter (which would have left an opening to let the stock implode with the rest of the tech market, after which one could have pounced and grabbed it for far cheaper). On the flip side, that less impulsive person probably wouldn't have started SpaceX in the first place (given the suicidal fiscal task involved and context at the time in the industry), or wouldn't have gone to the financial extremes required to make it succeed (betting essentially all of his wealth on Tesla and SpaceX).
I know it is popular/easy to hate on the man right now, but this is a really strange take.
Given that Musk has been talking about mars since at least 2001, many years before he had the resources he has now, and almost went bankrupt funding spacex's first orbital rocket, it's hard to believe he's pretending.
People seem happy to believe all negative things they hear about him, but discount anything that doesn't gel with this negative image. It's like how the same people who put all missteps of Tesla/SpaceX at Elons feet, will also discount any of the successes and say he has nothing to do with them.
I dunno, if you look at the Boring Company through the lens of "this man really wants to go to Mars", it kinda makes sense. Probably a lot of Mars colony infrastructure should be tunneled underground, given the lack of atmosphere / magnetosphere.
Things like Hyperloop also make more sense in that context.
> We wouldn't have to fight those wars for resources.
You mean wars for oil? Fusion would not solve that, that wars were not about energy per se but about control and domination, keeping USD as world reserve currency and US as world hegemon. Look at Taiwan and chips situation, no oil there, there will be always some "oil" out there that you will want to control instead of giving that control to your rivals. It's game theory 101.
okay but oil is a fundamental input into everything hence a much bigger threat than say TSMC's nextgen fab. everybody understands that with some effort those outputs of a strong economy can be recreated but not inputs. Arguably lithium or water may become that but we are currently far from it. Sure there will always be something we'd want to control but we can go in more calm, clearheaded way towards it rather than just use force because we have the biggest stick.
people love to invoke game theory but fail to explain why only we spend more than next 10 countries military budget combined. plus its quite unclear what we get out of it because of all the secrecy & likely its mostly inflated costs and kickbacks. The wars in Iraq/Afghanistan themselves have cost close to 3T over time & thats outside of annual budgets. Personally I'd have preferred to take medicare for all for that amount of money.
> Sure there will always be something we'd want to control but we can go in more calm, clearheaded way towards it rather than just use force because we have the biggest stick.
Unfortunately no, you can't go more calm because projection of force is what keeps status quo and your rivals in place, not liberal values or clearheaded minds. There is no world police, the one with the biggest stick makes the rules. US is not the first hegemon in history of the world, we had Roman Empire, we had Dutch Empire etc, all of the world hegemons were major military powers. There is always some challenger waiting in the shadows to take over your position, you can't just sit and be calm because you will lose what you have, I assure you that others will not just sit calm but claim what's yours if they see sign of weakness, history proves that again and again.
> but fail to explain why only we spend more than next 10 countries military budget combined
Well it's easy to explain, US have it in its doctrine that it needs to have military strong enough to fight 2 wars at a time so it needs to spend more than at least a few countries behind it but a lot of this budget is probably not spent well.
The problem here is that when you stop being world hegemon with the biggest stick, your currency stops being world reserve currency which means you can't finance your debt the same way as before, which has drastic consequences to your budget and it would be really fatal for US. Sometimes you just can't stop the music even when you don't like the melody because silence will hurt you.
> plus its quite unclear what we get out of it because of all the secrecy & likely its mostly inflated costs and kickbacks.
Agreed that's inefficient, you probably could achieve the same with lower costs but how much lower I don't know if anyone knows.
