[narrator]

You're looking at the world as a poor person. If you had Elon's brilliance you'd probably quit after you made $5 million dollars or so and definitely after you sold Zip2 back in the 1990s and spent the rest of your life on the beach. The only reason he's still working as hard as he does is not because he wants to spend that on himself. He wants the glory of going to Mars and having a positive impact on humanity and that requires control of the activities of large companies like SpaceX, etc. which requires ownership stakes in those companies that are valued in the billions.

One of the reasons that he campaigned so hard for Trump is that Kamala's proposed wealth taxes on unrealized capital gains were going to take his companies from him and he'd have to sell to Vanguard or Blackrock, who would give control of the companies to Boeing-tier mediocrity which would mean that we'd never get to Mars. There have been so many companies where the founders sold out and retired because they had enough money and they got bought by big conglomerates who destroyed those companies with mediocre management and neglect. This is the great thing about Elon, he just keeps building and leveraging all that money to create bigger and bigger companies using his creativity and management ability to achieve his goal of launching an era of space exploration.

[macintux]

That is a wildly generous interpretation of his behavior and motivations.

[fdschoeneman]

It's the most likely interpretation toe because it fits the known facts.

Ungenerous interpretations don't make sense and don't fit the known facts.

Musk isn't hiding his intentions. He's blasting them. He wants to make humans an interplanetary species. He wants his name to be associated with that for millennia. I don't see anything wrong with that and have trouble understanding why people hate him souch for it.

[kiba]

That is not what people hate Musk for. They hate Musk because he's that unlikable.

[fdschoeneman]

Why do you not like him?

[johnnyanmac]

Where do I begin?

- his work pracices at all his companies are that of an imbecile manbaby. There are very public reports of this for Tesla and SpaceX, at the very least.

- his "hyperloop" plan delayed a proper trans-state transportation system for a decade+

- he proceeded to further ruin twitter and be completely contradictory on his whole "free speech" advocation

- he literally tried to buy votes for a national US election. Then admitted his lottery was never a fair lottery (i.e. fraud). Pretty much knowing any lawsuits after the election was a cost to do business.

- and his punishment? being a part of a stupidly named cabinet organization that will probably do the opposite of its stated goals, given his history.

Those are just off the top of my head.

What reasons do I have to like Musk? Because he didn't screw up SpaceX as hard as NASA was screwed by the federal government? That he was first to market for American EVs (because US was too busy defending oil and ignoring that other countries were pushing ahead)?

[macintux]

For me, he seemed harmlessly eccentric until “pedo guy”. It’s been all downhill since then.

[fdschoeneman]

Because he ruined twitter? Okay. I see you.

[xkcd-sucks]

Some people don't want to be an interplanetary species at the expense of more urgent priorities; to them it isn't compelling that an ambitious man wants to immortalize himself using concepts from the science fiction of his childhood

[Zanfa]

> Musk isn't hiding his intentions. He's blasting them. He wants to make humans an interplanetary species.

What people say about what and why they do things and why they actually do them are rarely correlated.

[fdschoeneman]

Okay. What are his intentions? Since you're a mind reader?

[johnnyanmac]

It ain't deep. He wants to influence American policty to get more money for whatever personal ideals he has. This isn't mind reading so much as reflecting on his actions from this year alone.

[hnbad]

> He wants to make humans an interplanetary species.

Sure, that's one of the things he wants to do. But his actions don't demonstrate that this is the primary thing he wants to do.

You can't build a sustainable colony on Mars without establishing a sustainable supply line until it reaches self-sustainability. Given what we know about Mars at this point, we're easily centuries away from achieving self-sustainability on Mars even if we fully committed to this goal right away. This means it's not just a cool tech problem, it's a logistics problem and logistics are boring. There's a reason Musk has repeatedly said he merely wants to make it possible to colonize Mars, not that he wants to do it. He's also smart enough that he doesn't want to go there himself because he knows it would mean dying in a barren wasteland even in the best of cases. Musk doesn't want to do the digging, he wants to sell the shovels.

If we want to build up the supply lines to colonize Mars, we at the very least need not just cool space tech but also boring stuff like a permanent supply base on the moon. But the moon has become boring ever since the end of the Space Race and building a supply post on the moon is - again - a boring logistics problem first, not a cool space tech problem. And because it's boring, it's far easier to see the big problems with it (all of which not only hold true for Mars but also do so to a much greater scale): any supply lines you build to the moon require supply lines on Earth first.

If you want sustainable supply lines in space, you have to build sustainable supply lines on Earth. And to have sustainable supply lines on Earth for space, you need a sustainable source of surplus resources. And even if we ignore the social implications of generating such "surplus" when millions live in abject poverty, this can only work if we prevent climate change from spiraling further out of control because it's difficult to run a business when the economy has collapsed and even more difficult to get work done when all the workers keep dying (presumably dying consumers are a smaller issue if we only consider valuations not revenue).

Tesla initially produced four reasonably mass market EVs but the most Musk contributed to them personally concept-wise was the childish naming scheme to spell out "S3XY". This was followed by an electric semi that is largely forgotten after the initial hype and the Cybertruck which literally isn't considered road-safe in most countries and hardly qualifies as "mass market". Despite promising FSD for years, the best Tesla has demonstrated since were robotaxi concept cars that again don't seem to have been designed with mass market use in mind. As for FSD and robotics: again Tesla hasn't yet demonstrated any ability to come anywhere near Musk's promises. So contrary to the popular narrative Tesla is not "building an EV future" - not that it would be helping address climate change even if it were because that would require a focus on mass transport.

Which brings us to the next thing: the Boring company. Again Musk's narrative sold this as an important step in preparing for Mars because if water is underground on Mars we'll need a lot of tunnels but the company is best known for its many projects announced and subsequently cancelled or abandoned across the US - and the Las Vegas "Loop" which is a claustrophobic underground shuttle service with gamer lights and mostly exists because Elon Musk hyped the idea of a (high speed vacuum tunnel) "Hyperloop" to - and it's worth pointing out that he has literally admitted as much since - preempt plans to build a public highspeed rail system.

What else was part of the narrative? Oh, right: SolarCity. Again Musk bought a company and claimed it was part of a plan to colonize Mars because we don't have fossil fuels on Mars so certainly the future must be solar - and of course those Tesla Superchargers need to be charged somehow, too. The company was eventually folded into Tesla (as Tesla Energy) and has shifted from mass market solar panels to making most of its revenue from batteries and selling primarily to big customers.

SpaceX at least largely does what it says on the tin if you ignore that it mostly still exists because the US government all but abandoned direct investments in space travel and SpaceX managed to collect a number of lucrative government contracts by controlling a de-facto monopoly position. Starlink also mostly seems to exist to exert an uncomfortable amount of political power over the governments that have bought into it (as the Ukrainians had to find out the hard way).

Elon Musk has an almost obsessive hyperfixation on the letter X and the idea of colonizing Mars, yes - he's autistic. But that doesn't mean everything he does he does in service of that goal. It doesn't even mean he actively contributes towards that goal in a meaningful or well thought out manner. It doesn't explain why he decided to father an uncomfortable number of children with an even more uncomfortable selection of partners (especially when it comes to business partners and employees) or why he's extremely selective in which token child he decides to shower with praise and attention (if not his own then at least in public appearances). It doesn't explain why he actively sabotages more climate friendly public mass transit projects to favor unsustainable individualized transport deliberately designed in such a way it can not be accessible to most. It doesn't explain why he decided to make a great show of "leaving the left" and presenting himself as "anti-woke" just in time when a big hit piece on him was about to be published because of his inappropriate behavior toward women. Etc etc. None of that logically follows from the goal of making humans an interplanetary species except in the most trivial of ways (i.e. stranding a person on Mars would technically make humans an interplanetary species for as long as that person survives).

The hate (if you just want to lump all criticism or distate into that label) Elon Musk gets is not "because he wants to make humans an interplanetary species", he gets it for the things he does. And in many cases what he does is actively damaging to his stated goal.

[fdschoeneman]

Okay what do you think his primary goal is?

[M95D]

Get rich (done), play with the latest new toys (currently doing), have people remember him like George Westinghouse (will do).

[hnbad]

You're still assuming having a "primary goal" means one's actions have to be aligned with achieving that goal.

I didn't say "making mankind an interplanetary species" isn't his primary goal, I said that it's not the primary thing he wants to do. What he seems to want to do is be rich, father an absurd number of children with different women and be cheered on and celebrated by his fans and sycophants. He literally bought Twitter on a whim because he liked the attention he got there. He's obsessed with appearing "cool" ever since people called him "real life Tony Stark" and he let it get to his head even though his popularity massively took a nosedive shortly after.

[hilux]

Or maybe he just likes the attention, and he likes "winning," as measured by the size of his wealth.

I can think of a prominent politician with the same qualities.

[scottLobster]

Yeah, all his antics in buying/posting on Twitter and his pushing of the Cybertruck, BS androids, "hyperloop" etc are totally part of a grand mission in the service of mankind, and not the acts of an obsessive, socially mal-adjusted narcissist.

Gwynne Shotwell is more responsible for SpaceX's operational success than Elon will ever be, she's clearly done a great job of managing up and letting him take the "glory" he so desperately yearns for, but all he really provided was the initial vision and money. Not to understate that contribution, but his supposed "brilliance" is pure marketing. We've seen what happens we he actually gets meaningful operational control of a company (Twitter) and a product (Cybertruck), and it isn't good.

[7thaccount]

We've already sent probes to Mars. There's no reason to send people other than to show we can. It's extremely uninhabitable...like Antarctica is a paradise in comparison with water, air, and a lack of radiation. We have nowhere near the technology to terraform Mars either. I guess you could dig someone a cave and send them some nuclear batteries and a bunch of prepackaged food, but what's the point?

Elon is an oligarch plain and simple. SpaceX is impressive, and I'm a big fan of NASA's research, but let's look past the marketing of him trying to save the human species or whatever.

I do think humanity may have to settle another world (or move to a post-biological existence where we can just park our satellite brains around a star for energy), but this is going to take a lot of scientific advancement over many centuries. Elon's plan would make a lot more sense if Mars was an Earth 2.0 and we just needed to move a bunch of people there, but it's not and even if we do find something really close to Earth with JWST, it would take centuries to get there. In short, our best approach is to save the planet we already have and continue funding scientific research.

[someuser2345]

> There's no reason to send people other than to show we can.

That is true for lots of other things. What's the point of building the Taj Mahal? What's the point of running a marathon? What's the point of getting the world record for the longest time spent underwater? Just to show that we can.

> Elon's plan would make a lot more sense if Mars was an Earth 2.0 and we just needed to move a bunch of people there, but it's not and even if we do find something really close to Earth with JWST, it would take centuries to get there.

I agree that we probably won't be able to have a viable Mars colony in our lifetime. However, I do think that the pursuit of that goal will result in lots of useful inventions; just look at what SpaceX has accomplished already.

[7thaccount]

Making a reusable rocket is not the same thing as a sustainable settlement in a hostile environment. I mean sure ...why not other than it's a huge waste of resources.

[jay_kyburz]

Musk aside, I think there is huge value in knowing how to sustain human life indefinitely without the earth. In fact, I think its inevitable that humans will need to leave earth at some point in our future.

It may simply be as a result of population and overcrowding, it may be to flee war and persecution. I think there is a small chance we have already made changes to our atmosphere that make life here incompatible with humans.

Its possible that within just a few hundred years, humans need to live entirely within climate controlled environments. If I had Musk level money I would be working on this now.

[johnnyanmac]

> That is true for lots of other things.

it may be a hot take, but yes. A lot of humanity has indeed been ways to show off how big someone's dick is, or as a dick measuring contest.

The moonlanding was an amazing but ultimately useless landmark in the grand scheme of things. Very little of the tech used back then is useful for a practical space supply line. The ability to launch out of our atmosphere and later put sattelites into orbit was 90% of the worth of such resarch 60 years later.

[kiba]

We've already sent probes to Mars. There's no reason to send people other than to show we can. It's extremely uninhabitable...like Antarctica is a paradise in comparison with water, air, and a lack of radiation. We have nowhere near the technology to terraform Mars either. I guess you could dig someone a cave and send them some nuclear batteries and a bunch of prepackaged food, but what's the point?

People always look at this with hard nosed pragmatism. That's the wrong lens to view Space colonization. It's a vision and a dream.

[Spooky23]

ROFL.

Thanks for taking up the mantle for the poor multibillionaires. The poor guy is homeless, after all.

There’s nothing more hilarious than folks devoting time to simp for people like this.