It’s so insane to me that people honestly believe that we need billionaires to fund all their hedonic desires in order to achieve anything good and useful as a society. It’s provably false and frankly an absolutely pessimistic view of society and humanity.
Once upon a time you needed nation state sponsorship in order to sail across the ocean.
It's absolutely insane to me that people don't see that a billionaire can do as a vanity project something that was ~50yr ago only the purview of superpowers as an obvious sign of societal progress.
Why compare this "single man's power" to a state from 50 years ago? It's disingenuous.
And it isn’t because it’s such a good opportunity only they have a chance to succeed on, or we’d see plenty of large companies or a few unicorn startups trying as well.
That doesn’t mean they will never get some revenue, maybe recoup their investments, or even see real profits. Space X is on a trajectory in that general direction. But it isn’t what motivated them.
Musk/Bezos/Branson are making space travel a paying proposition, which makes all the difference.
And is a good example of creating negative externalities, lots of ground based astronomy (a field that has contributed immensely to our collective scientific knowledge and pushed technology advancements forward globally) extremely difficult due to those same satellites that create interference. Yes, global internet is good, but funnily enough this satellite network creates the need for more astronomical observations be done from space/orbit.. Handy that he is in the business of selling that service as well..
So while I agree his rocket technology is a great advancement and has spurred others to create similar reusable first stage rocket tech, these efforts were already underway. Musk might have accelerated this through risking his personal wealth when creating SpaceX but this was not a one man effort and people should spend less time attributing these advancements to one person.
Hoping "competition" in this space returns to helping orgs like NASA achieve scientific goals (rather than private joy rides), but that would require convincing govs to spend more tax money on these organizations..
In particular, I do hope the reusable technology benefits people first and then science. I sometimes wonder about how many Einsteins are born and die without ever learning to read. First and foremost, I hope we use this technology to benefit people and science second.
You could have erased any person in SpaceX and SpaceX would have happened anyway. Erase Musk, and no SpaceX. Musk was the lynchpin to making it happen. He provided the vision, the impetus, the funding, and the leadership.
That's why he gets (and deserves) the credit.
It's just like Apple. Apple floundered with CEO after CEO, winding up 90 days from bankruptcy. Then Jobs became CEO, and Apple became the richest company in the world.
With the same staff.
Blue Origin is up to ~$10B already and hasn't even gone orbital yet.
Also, the economy was considerably smaller in those days, and so the Apollo program took up a much larger share of it.
Isn't that what adjusting to today's dollars essentially does? Those $28 billion were back then what $257 billion are in today's economy.
To make it more obvious, a town council spending $1 million on a project is a much bigger undertaking (for them) than a country spending $1 million. It has nothing to do with inflation. I.e. consider it as percentage of GDP.
The purchasing power of a dollar has grown ~8.5x over the past 60 years.
The US GDP has grown about 38x in that same time.
And it doesn't matter what the rest of the economy was doing if we've converted it to today's numbers. The argument you were making was that government was intrinsically bloated, but from my view these private orgs are barely keeping up with 1960s .gov.
Even if we needed big corporations, we still do not need billionaires.
If you take the limit of concentrating wealth, you get a dictatorship. They don't seem to do much. It's hard to believe in democracy and insane wealth concentration at the same time.
Large investments are not the same as risky investments.
Government need to get a job done, but they also need to appease voters and play politics to be able to achieve long-term goals. Businesses self-select for efficiency in the long-term, because those that aren't efficient go bankrupt or get overtaken by a more efficient upstart.
I think PG has spilled a lot of ink about this in the context of VC investment, but the same idea doubly applies to government funding because their time horizons are even longer term. If all you do is optimize for next quarter, next year, or even the next 5 years, you're going to miss the things that at first seem innocuous or useless, but then in 30 years blow up into something huge.
NASA has been beholden to the latest administration’s whims and inconsistent budget allocation for decades.
I think the great challenge of our generation will be a way to come together with such single minded focus to tackle problems without trying to exterminate each other.
(1) https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/atomic-bomb-hist...
Except that's never happened, not even close. Ironically, the modern activists are busy trying to force businesses into getting involved in politics unrelated to their business. This smacks of foolishness to me, as in be careful what one wishes for.
> It's hard to believe in democracy and insane wealth concentration at the same time.
Wealth in a capitalist country is created, not concentrated.
You also seem to completely abandon your previous statement: "Countries without billionaires are mired in poverty. Billionaires can make high risk investments. A million people won't." Additionally, you've responded to arguments I haven't even made about forcing businesses to be involved in politics.
Your ideas seem like a loose collection of conservative talking points and fail to make any sort of coherent argument.
Caesar gained power through running a business providing people with wine?
> You also seem to completely abandon your previous statement
Not at all. It is obvious that people who became wealthy through force of arms or using taxation to line their pockets are in a different category.
If you look at historical rankings of wealth, by far the richest people were leaders of great empires. They were so wealthy that it's silly to put it in modern terms (1) & (2). Caesar Augustus controlled the entire output of Egypt which was the breadbasket of the Mediterranean world. His person wealth is estimated to be in the $5 to $10 trillion range.
More recently, how rich was Stalin when he could literally do anything with an economy making up 10% of global GDP? It's even unclear how much Putin is worth with credible accusations that he recently built a $1B palace (3) and has a wealth in the $200B range.
It is only our recently invented democratic institutions that enable billionaires who profit from non-violent sources. I sincerely hope you develop a sense of how important these institutions are.
This is my last comment btw, I hope you feel like you've learned something.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...
(2) https://www.luxuo.com/the-lux-list/super-rich/richest-people...
Stalin didn't buy his way into power. He took power by force, then used that power to make himself rich.
This is not capitalism. As I pointed out, people who take money through force are in a quite different category.
> I hope you feel like you've learned something.
I'm dumbfounded that you believe that Stalin, Caesar, etc., were free market capitalists gaining their wealth through running a successful business.
> It is only our recently invented democratic institutions that enable billionaires who profit from non-violent sources.
None have yet turned that into running the country. Note how billionaire Bloomberg's presidential campaign failed miserably. As did Ross Perot's. Rich people in America have not had much of a track record of buying themselves into office, though elected representatives have a tendency to get very rich while in office. Hmmm...
Kickstarter exists.