Elon Musk is now the richest person in the world | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk is now the richest person in the world

cnbc.com

34 pointstempsy10 comments

This reminds me of "I will Fear No Evil" by Robert A Heinlein. The billionaire with a brain transplant into his secretary remarked something along the lines of "Once you get rich enough you can't help making more money than you can spend."

It seems from a distance, Elon tried to spend all his money on a Mars exploration, solar power, and to force automakers to start building electric cars. But then he just made more money. I can only imagine how rich he'll be after Starlink gets going in earnest.

Who knew, it pays to be a forward thinker

Let us not forget though, the vast majority of that wealth is entirely in stock. I would suspect he's still (relatively) cash poor. I'm unfamiliar with him selling off stock regularly but I know Bezos has made some rather large sales with some sort of regulatory historically however.

It's still an amazing feat though, and exciting given the reusable rocket thing really just getting going and Starlink still being in beta and desparately needed for large swaths of the country. My wife and I recently moved to a very rural area and we got extremely lucky being just off a major interstate that just happened to have a backbone running along it so for the first time in my life I can get gigabit internet in the sticks, when I couldn't in Indianapolis, but in my town of 300~ people only about half of us have access to it while the others are stuck with hughesnet garbage service.

Congrats Mr. Musk.

That's kinda the weird thing though. Musk has done amazing things with SpaceX, setting the infrastructure that could, if asteroid mining really takes off, set us up for a post-scarcity civilization. But SpaceX isn't the reason for his immense wealth; it's Tesla, which at its core is just a fucking car company that for some reason is now worth more than the GDP of Switzerland. Do all his investors just expect the 20 something other large car companies to just completely fuck off and make Tesla a monopoly?

I just don't understand.

Asian and especially Chinese car companies will eventually destroy American and European car companies just like they did with electronics. Nowadays everybody use electronics made by Samsung, LG and Panasonic and in the past people at least in Europe laughed at Asian electronics products.

All those buggy whip and carriage companies with deep horse expertise, with feed bag hooks built right into the carriage and self-clearing manure scrapers mounted in place above the carriage wheels, producing millions of carriages a year worldwide, and Henry Ford somehow thinks he knows better than them. And now they are even bolting on gas engines to some of the carriages. People think those companies are going to just take this lying down?

I just don't understand.

how can you compare between going from horse to a gas engine, with going from gas propelled car to electric propelled car?

Energy is also pretty critical to achieve a post-scarcity world. A lot of Tesla engineering effort is focused on batteries and energy efficiency.

It's quite difficult to invest in SpaceX, as not only is it private, but all their recent rounds have been oversubscribed. They've likely been significantly underpricing the company.

Musk made 85% of his wealth this year, so he hasn't really had time to cash anything out yet.

Question:

How did elon maintain his share in Tesla during the finance rounds? He was not a cofounder. During the years, he did not have other significant sources of income. And Tesla has been capital hungry for a long time.

I am quite interested in his techniques, and am guessing so do a lot of founder wannabes.

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