[nine_k]

I don't care about the owner too much. He's merely an owner, and apparently not even an expert in the field as to command the direction in crazy ways. As long as Mr Musk continues bringing in money, and allowing the engineers do the right thing, I'm okay with that.

[spwa4]

Too bad he's also taking away money from tens of millions of poor americans. I don't even understand. He could have just ... not done that, wouldn't have cost him one cent.

[rapsey]

How is he taking money away.

[NaomiLehman]

via subsidies @ corporate socialism? that's one of the things.

[rogerrogerr]

Then vote to have fewer corporate subsidies.

[rapsey]

How are gov subsidies taking away money from tens of millions. That is not how the gov budget works.

Spacex contracts are by far the lowest cost to get cargo into orbit though. They save the gov money.

[spwa4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effic...

Your spacex contracts thing is bullshit too, but first the more important stuff. I think you'll agree many of these affect poor americans greatly, as well as poor people worldwide. A partial list of what Musk did with DOGE:

* Mass layoffs across the government. Especially education is badly affected.

* USAID shutdowns

* DOE downsizing (ie. killing education)

* Sabotaging student loans (purposefully cutting the infrastructure and personnel for getting a student loan)

* Killing off local Social Security access by closing offices

The list goes on. Next time Elon Musk says he needs engineers, I hope someone has the courage to ask him why he seriously and purposefully damaged education for Americans.

As for the spacex contracts: a cheaper price only helps if it actually leads to less spending. Since the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space, it cannot cut funding to ULA contracts. Therefore spacex is more expensive, despite the cheaper sticker price.

Think of it this way. Let's say there's 2 cars. One is 40,000 USD (thanks to Musk and Trump's tariffs). One is 20,000 USD. But due to law you can only buy the 20,000 USD car if you ALSO buy the 40,000 USD car, there's no other way. So the real price is:

* the "cheaper" car: 60,000 USD total price

* the "expensive" car: 40,000 USD total price

See the problem here? Spacex is not actually cheaper. Only by not counting a bunch of costs because they come out of a different budget is spacex cheaper. A fact ("deception" I would say) that keeps repeating in mr. Musk's businesses. The sticker price on Tesler cars, for example, has similar problems: EXPENSIVE mandatory maintenance means the price of Musk's electric cars is far more than the competition, despite the sticker price sometimes being cheaper. Of course, now even the sticker price is far from the best.

[TMWNN]

>* USAID shutdowns

The rest of the world is not entitled to unlimited American funds for all time.

>* DOE downsizing (ie. killing education)

Canada doesn't even have a federal-level education department. Is Canada filled with uneducated morons?

>As for the spacex contracts: a cheaper price only helps if it actually leads to less spending. Since the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space, it cannot cut funding to ULA contracts. Therefore spacex is more expensive, despite the cheaper sticker price.

The mind boggles at this "logic".

The desire for having multiple launchers is not because "the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space", but because the US got badly burned by putting all its rocket eggs into one space shuttle basket.

If SpaceX didn't exist, and the US government used ULA and Blue Origin for all its launches, the US would be paying far more than it is now. Don't believe me? Biden's NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>.

On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.

The above is purely a cost analysis, and doesn't even cover SpaceX allowing the US to no longer being dependent on Russia for sending people into space, as was the case from 2011 to 2020.

[rapsey]

Killing education please. Dept of education does not run schools. Regarding loans, the best thing he could have done is abolish the program completely as it is the main reason the cost of education has gone up so much.

He also made a great many people rich not to mention how many jobs. That does not count?

Also I have no idea what expensive mandatory maintenance you mean. As if any other car does not require maintenance.