It takes extraordinary skill to successfully juggle multiple ventures. So it is natural for some to want to take on the challenge. I think it is pretty impressive.
> It takes extraordinary skill to successfully juggle multiple ventures.
That's a myth. I've done that, and I know a lot of people who do that. Do you think Musk is writing sparse attention code for Grok? Does he even know how Grok's architecture works under the hood? Or that he designed the data centers? I mean, you delegate stuff. The only hard thing is getting the right people, but if you're a hyped up billionaire, it's easy mode because you can pay a lot, and people want to work for you. You just create an environment where they can achieve things.
There are times when the majority of your work is simply attending public meetings, podcasts, and doing interviews. People really overestimate what's involved in the work of a billionaire CEO. The people actually making things happen in space industry or AI work harder, longer, and solve more complex problems than any CEO and in some cases they need to work hard against the CEOs to actually make things happen.
And he's not juggling Blue Origin that well given the delays. Still impressive to go to space, so the man deserves credit, but it likely would have been several years faster and billions less if he had been more involved.
By pure nature of how companies work, a space company with this mandate and so much funding, unless its being used for money laundering, will have a modicum of progress. BO has barely had that. No space company with so much money and so much runway has achieved so little.
It’s free money. You spend 3billion and have more billions drop in from investors. You get to create great tech and then make 100s more billions drop from IPO. When the initial investment is a rounding error in your portfolio, it’s a crime to not do this
Realistically if they were capable of being happy doing something other than acquiring more currency they would never become billionaires. Any reasonable person would simply live life enjoying their 10s or 100s of millions.
In the old days there was a saying "The only way Bill Gates could spend all his fortune is a manned mission to Mars."
Well, Bezos and Musk are trying that, and it turns out there is still a lot left to spend, so instead of helping the needy they do what is trendy for billionaires, which is build another AI company.