[motohagiography]

So, I have to ask: If Elon Musk is working on propulsion tech to go to Mars, and Bob Lazar claims to have worked on reverse engineering propellentless tech and is one of the single digit number of living people to have encountered it directly, and NASA is slow rolling their own understanding of it, given the limited available expertise in this area how can Musk afford to not hire Lazar? From a due diligence perspective, Musk would need to know with a high degree of certainty that Lazar is full of crap.

While this might sound insane, from a portfolio perspective, if a VC firm is invested in SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, or anyone else in the space, it seems negligent to not have some exposure to a company with someone like Lazar involved in it, unless you really knew for sure, as he and people like him present an existential risk to rocket-based tech companies. That guy is the ultimate hedge.

[boxed]

Your logic assumes only one such person. The problem is that there are tens of thousands of similar people with, let's be super kind, unlikely ideas. If you hire them all that's not a hedge that's a huge cost with an almost 0% probability of payoff.

I'd bet the number of such people with unreasonable ideas will go drastically up if you start hiring them too.

[motohagiography]

The analog I'm thinking of is that space propulsion could turn out to be as much of a sandbox as cybersecurity and crytpo have been, where there was always a ceiling above which everyone just agreed to not look. I'm being super charitable about Lazar, but having been in the security field both pre- and post- Snowden, Lazar is more like a Binnie or Drake figure, with the full extent of the issue still further off in the future. What good technologists suspected about crypto and saw little edges of, vs. what ultimately came out implies companies like those mentioned above would need to have done some deeper arguments and analysis beyond blowing him off as just a kook. Musk's opinion on Lazar would be interesting for its own sake.

However, this is also like saying you have to rule out every "free energy" conspiracy before starting a battery company as well, so it's not really that much of a forcing function at all.

[xibalba]

> know with a high degree of certainty that Lazar is full of crap

This is your answer.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and Lazar can't ever seem to manage the latter.

[motohagiography]

I'd agree, but if we're trading tropes, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence either. He's easy to discredit and dismiss, and it's meaningless to my life whether he's real or not, but if you've got billions on the line in the space propulsion game, I'd think you'd need to have gone deep into his claims to determine he's full of it.

[btilly]

The answer is that any entrepreneur who focuses on what their competition is doing rather than what they are doing is guaranteed to fail.

There are far more likely ways for SpaceX to fail than that some random professor replaces rockets with a drive using novel physics. And even if said professor does produce that drive, it wouldn't threaten SpaceX's main business unless the drive was able to produce sufficient thrust to escape the Earth's gravity well. (Flash notice, not even the professor in question thinks it will.)

Therefore Musk should continue to be focuses on what he is doing and not even think about this unless there is a working prototype validated by NASA.

[perl4ever]

>From a due diligence perspective, Musk would need to know with a high degree of certainty that Lazar is full of crap.

Surely people who know who Lazar is knew that in the 90s? Assuming they were alive then.

[carry_bit]

If he wasn't full of crap, then you also running the risk of the government/some other group not wanting the tech out there and then preventing the success of your investment.