[jbecke]

Option 1: Elon has control and optimizes for cool shit and going to Mars, and maybe abuses the corporate entity a bit, as a piggy bank, or whatever.

Option 2: the market has control, and optimizes for short term starlink revenue and the launch business.

I prefer Option 1.

[pjc50]

Option 3: Elon takes over the Federal government, causes some major security incidents, and cuts off USAID stranding a number of Federal employees and cutting off short term food support for hundreds of thousands of people depending on it.

Option 4: Elon takes over a social network and tries to Orbanize the West with it.

[jnovek]

It’s not just cutting food support. Hundreds of thousands of people have died because we cut USAID.

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts

[phkahler]

>> In addition, we are unable to directly update our analysis using the previous approach given the complexity of using USASpending.gov and SF133 report data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to update from foreignassistance.gov because ID codes do not match up.

They can't really tie the cuts to actually useful programs. That was a big reason for the cuts.

[tastyface]

Correct. He has unfathomable amounts of blood on his hands. And I don't have the links handy, but I read at least two articles that directly traced his criminally negligent dismantling of USAID to individual deaths.

Every article concerning Musk or his companies needs to forever be prefaced with this fact.

[pjc50]

I deliberately undersold the claim because this is one of those things that's so big and yet so invisible in the news and discourse. If we had 100k people die in a city anywhere on the globe due to, say, an earthquake, it would be headlines. These people just .. cease to exist, unremarked.

(It does raise questions about how Elon might manage the food supply to Mars, if that ever happened)

[ben_w]

> (It does raise questions about how Elon might manage the food supply to Mars, if that ever happened)

Indeed.

One of the various things which made me down-rate my estimation for Musk's competence was him suggesting someone may want to run the first pizza restaurant on Mars. Like, sure, someone will, but this is so far down the chain of necessary tech it's like me personally pontificating about what I'll do when I'm as rich as Musk is today: If he's thinking about pizza restaurants, one has to ask if anyone's bothered with figuring out how to clean the perchlorates from the soil to get the minerals needed to fertilise the wheat to make the dough for the pizza.

I've yet to see any sign SpaceX have even built a machine for doing the Sabatier process on Mars, which itself is a prerequisite for anything like a Starship-based Mars colony even getting started, though at least Musk has gotten as far as talking about it.

[rswail]

If you want Option 1, then stay a private company.

Don't ask the public for money and then not provide any of the corporate requirements under the SEC for the proper operation of the markets.

You can't have both.

[jbecke]

You can, e.g. Zuck/Meta. (I understand you are making a moral argument, not a legal one, I understand it, I disagree, courts disagree too)

[fny]

Tesla is already publically traded. It's valuation depends on investors buying into Musks vision.

As a rule, investors optimize for long term growth since that's what maximizes valuations. All the megacap companies are judged by future growth.

The effect is companies tend to exaggerate and lie about what they can achieve in the long term to juice their own stock. Elon's def got the juice.

[jbecke]

Investors should optimize for long term growth, yes. The problem is Management (CEO, etc.) will get fired if things look bad. So the incentive for management, if they can get fired, is to ensure monotonic increase. Sometimes — especially for a rocket company! — you should be allowed to fail for a few years. You should be allowed to take big swings, without risk of getting fired. If Elon knows he is in control, he can think long-term. If he's at risk of being let go if things look bleak, his optimization function will be different (and, IMO, net worse for society).

[malshe]

In that case they should stay private

[righthand]

Lol net worse for society. You types can’t stop the blatant propaganda and bullshit price pumping statements can you?

[inglor_cz]

I suspect that the set of interested investors would look very different in both cases. Maybe even with an empty intersection.

[travelalberta]

People raised on a diet of social democracy propaganda will kick and scream when you tell them people aren't equal and that decisions should be limited to exceptional individuals and not the mob. If you don't like the SpaceX structure don't invest. It's that easy. I'd rather give Elon the reins and see what happens. He managed to make electric cars viable and starlink is an incredible technical achievement. There's so much cool engineering to be done and only Elon seems to be capable of half of it. One person with a vision is more valuable than a million shareholders with a slight level of financial investment.

[t43562]

It's just undesirable to let people get too powerful if you believe in democracy. Fall of the Roman Empire etc.

[watwut]

Elon has control and optimizes for ability to abuse the corporate entity as much as possible. Expects other people to pay for issues he caused, causes as much harm as possible to feel as a manly man with no empathy and his friends in government and Epstein circles back all that up.

[trunkiedozer]

Wrote without evidence

[shafyy]

You must be living under a rock if you think all super rich billionaires like Musk are doing is "abuses the corporate entity a bit, as a piggy bank, or whatever"

[jbecke]

You can either concentrate power or disperse it. NASA, Boing, etc. is what happens when you disperse it. Committees aren't bold. The reason SpaceX exists is because Elon willed it into existence.

[ben_w]

> The reason SpaceX exists is because Elon willed it into existence.

And then sued the government into considering using them.

He's also setting the rules so shareholders can't sue him.

Concentrated power can indeed get a lot more done at speed; it does not say anything about if the things being done more of and faster are sensible, and while Musk used to make bets that seemed to be risky to him but with positive expected return, he's now openly talking about things like wanting the Tesla "robot army" under his control and the chance of AI killing everyone, where it becomes everyone else's problem if he's wrong.

[doc_ick]

I prefer Option 2 as musk has an alleged track record of trading things between his companies with no oversight, and how sAfE cybertrucks are