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Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

It's possible that even Elon Musk has changed his mind about the value of Mars for humanity. One could view his plan to convince cities replace their roads with 3D tunnels, as preparing a massive shelter for humanity, to protect us against catastrophic risk, instead of a mars colony.

BTW: he has very smart leverage strategies, especially in the context of him a change makes, instead of of the common focus of value extraction of most business people.

Is there any place one can read about such strategies ?

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Or the tunneling machines are for building habitats on Mars. Well, it's a fun hypothesis at least. Anything that could improve traffic in major cities gets my vote of approval regardless of what other applications it has.

I think your point is probably closer to the truth. Musk's desire to travel to mars seems to stem from the fact that it's a pretty awesome, adventurous thing to do, so it's one that doesn't fade on some whims. Whatever people say about Musk, he undoubtedly is pushing humanity in a better direction so maybe we should leave him to it.

From [0]:

> Musk is without doubt a dazzling salesman. Who better than a guardian of human welfare to sell you your new, self-driving Tesla? Andrew Ng—the chief scientist at Baidu, known as China’s Google—based in Sunnyvale, California, writes off Musk’s Manichaean throwdown as “marketing genius." “At the height of the recession, he persuaded the U.S. government to help him build an electric sports car,” Ng recalled, incredulous.

Based on the TED talk [1], Musk seems to be proposing a scarce luxury transport solution. The Boring Company is an answer to the question, "What inconvenience do Los Angeles millionaires suffer daily?" And for this he is being elevated to no less than savior of humanity?

[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dol...

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_buildin...

Forget about this argument. USA needs tech companies, and they need attractive ones that get investment. You think our tax money that builds roadways and schools materializes out of thin air? No, we need great, powerful, sexy, innovative companies. And guess what guy, those are expensive as all hell! But in the long run the tech gets cheaper and we all get it.

Let's take a trip back to the 1980s. You're looking at a desktop PC company like Apple, tearing them down how their first computer costs $5000 in today's dollars. Should anyone have paid you any mind at all? Of course not! Because of Apple pushing the tech so hard for so long, we now have another behemoth tech company on our country's soil. Have some perspective before you go cutting down tall poppies.

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