Comment by Diederich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Diederich | Hacker News Reader

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Yes. I think it's easy to understand most everything SpaceX does.

Musk wants humans to become an interplanetary species, full stop. Everything SpaceX does is in support of that.

Vast amounts of money and resources will be required for the final goal, likely more than SpaceX will ever have or control. So, in order to get others to spend big on the main goal, SpaceX needs to demonstrate realistic capabilities, such as bootstrapping a permanent settlement on Mars, though dependent on regular shipments from earth.

To accomplish that, SpaceX needs a lot of cash.

Crew Dragon is about the cash. Starlink is (mostly) about the cash.

I'm less certain about the following, but it might be accurate: Tesla is about the cash necessary to bootstrap a Mars settlement. If Tesla really goes big, Musk's shares will be worth many more billions than they are worth right now. I would not be surprised if, at some time in the future, he cashes out of Tesla and drops it all on SpaceX.

Exactly. Although I wouldn't personally think he built Tesla to potentially support Space X. He gave it the same 10% slim chance of success when he started as Space X, and he allocated to it roughly the same amount of funds ~ 100mm to each (for a total = to his entire net worth). So by going after Tesla as well he significantly hindered his chances of succeeding with Space X as that narrowed funds available for that project by half and if he had failed the fourth Falcon 1 launch it would have been game over for that. If all he cared for was Mars, it would have made a lot more sense for him to throw 200mm into Space X and greatly increase his chances of successfully developing an orbital vehicle and grow from there in partnership with NASA.

I think generally his core vision or at least core mission statement is to help humanity scale and survive and he'll allocate funds / explore opportunities however he seems best to achieve that.

One pillar of that vision is planetary colonisation to act as a hedge / diversification against a single planet extinction event. The other is making Earth life sustainable hence sustainably electrifying all forms of fossil fuel use cases the founding venture for that being Tesla.

All that said, I have a hard time at this point imagining Elon ever being resource constrained for his goals. He just has too many promising potential revenue lines. Hell, he could maybe fund all of it one day with a single asteroid capture for all we know.

His core constraint is time and he'll do whatever he can to speed things up. Crew Dragon was an important deliverable but ultimately obviously can't be expanded to serve the final vision and it makes sense to quickly move on with all the additional knowledge gained from the effort as a huge benefit.

Starship development should make the next few years just fascinating for us space nerds.

My guess is that he didn't start Tesla with the idea of using it as a (possible) cash cow for SpaceX. It was, as you said, to help humanity scale and survive.

What follows is definitely a bit more 'out there' than usual, and I don't hold strongly to it.

As Mr. Mush has gotten older, I suspect that his internal calculations related to the possibility of the collapse of human civilization have gone up enormously. Specifically, and he's said this multiple times, he thinks AI is the number one threat to human civilization, followed very closely by climate change. (Note: this isn't terminator style AI. It's software/hardware that is smarter than any human, or indeed all humans put together, but in the hands of very few people.)

My guess is that these have changed his perspective on the relative importance of SpaceX and Tesla in the greater scheme of things.

> Starship development should make the next few years just fascinating for us space nerds.

I am utterly pumped.

That's very possible. Although I'm not sure how he imagines escaping to another planet would be a solution for whatever threat AI specifically might pose. I'm pretty sure it would find a way to follow you through the solar system :)

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