[Glyptodon]

Musk is kind of fascinating.

On one hand SpaceX and Starlink are businesses that it's practically embarrassing that seemingly nobody else even tried to build. You look into it and look at Bezos and Blue Origin and wonder if the markets can actually build new businesses anymore.

Then you set them aside and realize that he basically got away with visa fraud because he was wealthy to begin with and lucked into making tons of money off PayPal and didn't even found Tesla...

...and the lesson I take away isn't that there's anything special about Musk. It's that if you have billions of dollars almost anybody with some kind of preoccupation can build giant businesses related to it.

For example, I totally believe if some random geek obsessed with SeaQuest had been part of the PayPal Mafia they could have figured out a way to make a billion dollar business out of underwater habitats and submarines.

...at least if they were crazed in public enough about it, which seems to have turned into a key part of how Musk works at some point.

Kind of like if you have a lot of money and a few obsessions you now get ahead more by having Tom Cruise couch hopping moments than by being an actual Howard Hughes or Hearst.

Separately we obviously really shouldn't be letting companies with such concentrated ownership be publicly traded with these multi-class shares, but I guess that's where we are now: reinventing feudalism in market trappings.

[Zigurd]

Starlink and Falcon 9 are the most impressive technological achievements in their domains. But people are getting way ahead of themselves claiming that these are business successes. EBITDA is a metric you can defend when applied to software. That's because incremental sales have near zero cost. And you don't have to replace the satellite constellation every five years.

Similarly it is remarkable that you can land a booster that wasn't designed to do that. But can you actually refurbish and re-fly it for a meaningful savings? This is another instance where software accounting practices don't work when you're dealing with big expensive tangible objects like rocket engines.

SpaceX has been around for 20+ years. And they are still their own biggest customer for launch capacity by a very large margin. Where is the demand?

[bigyabai]

"In this world some people born are like keys that move the world and exist having no connection to the social heirarchy established by man." - Kentaro Miura

I think that the average American discounts how important sociopaths are to the economy. The man chanting about developers, the guy who says you're holding it wrong, the human lawnmower who supports genocide, the CEO that introduced his wife to Epstein, the gay executive that launders bigoted politics, the other gay executive that wants to scan your eyeball and build AGI. The scheming Afrikaner now rides in to collect his due, astride two horses and a retinue of unsold EVs.

They all have rabid fanbases, but also the Mandate of Heaven. These sociopaths can exploit whatever they set their eyes on, and dominate it until their judgement fails them. It wouldn't be such a problem if Americans had a healthy skepticism for chronic liars, and didn't worship brand identity to their last breath. That tide is slowly changing, but not fast enough to stop where we're headed.