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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

>Elon has been pretty vocal about regretting making Tesla public

That's laughable, because without making Tesla public he wouldn't be able to live the superstar uber rich lifestyle he thinks he deserves. Pretty much everything he has personally is owed to Tesla public valuation.

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> superstar uber rich lifestyle

to be fair that lifestyle was enabled for the rest of his life in the paypal days. i don't think anything he does now is driven by getting a new car or eating at a fancier restaurant. He's been able to have as luxurious lifestyle as possible for a long time.

Cars and restaurants aren't "Uber rich" lifestyle. Buying Twitter to make sure he can control how viral his tweets are is an "Uber rich" move.

PayPal's money wouldn't even be enough to get him a sports team.

No, the way Elon is, no number is high enough. It must get bigger. THAT'S the superstar uber rich lifestyle I meant, where you are playing the equivalent of an Idle Game with Bezos and Gates.

I suspect he actually believes his purpose is to save humanity from nuclear war (per Griffin's approach above). This is when Elon stopped buying and crashing sports cars.

You missed those years when TSLA was being shorted and when it was ok the brink of going under. It’s easy to hate but going public is two edged sword.

His wealth is not so much about living a rich lifestyle, but about shaping society to his views. His wealth allowed him to buy a media megaphone (TwitterX) to further his political objectives.

Elon had tens of millions of dollars before starting Tesla. He risked all of it to start Tesla and SpaceX.

Actually SpaceX was 85% government funded according to the guy who gave him the money, Michael D. Griffin. This was front-loaded. Private money was never at risk.

Any source for this? Wikipedia says: "Musk provided half of his $180 million from PayPal stocks to the newly founded company"

And the government provided over $1B..

Search for the word 'excessive' https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/hist...

Griffin is arguing against himself there in giving all that money-- covering his tail. The important part if you read the contracts is a majority of the money was awarded before SpaceX built any hardware, they just had to present plans and half the money was transferred. Elon never risked his own money as all the costs were covered up front and if they failed they would only lose the other half of the contract.

Elon was very scrappy and cheap in the initial builds because he didn't want to risk his own cash.

Musk ran out of money, got more from Thiel before getting that 1 billion. Some of us lived through this and remember the contract award for Falcon 9

Actually Griffin's COTS government contract was awarded in 2005 (with half money up front), three years before Thiel first invested.

I'll have to check that

And... ?

So the government wanted the services and was willing to take some risk paying in advance that SpaceX couldn’t deliver? Smart and successful bet in this case, but I guess they tried that with other companies as well and those didn’t deliver?!

Agree, the point is that the story of Elon taking personal financial risk with SpaceX is false.

For Tesla, besides the huge DOE grant, he had SpaceX loan some of the excess government money to Tesla in the first few years to derisk his investment there as well.

Well putting half your fortune in a venture is literally taking significant personal financial risk.

Besides that, there are plenty of firms taking government money but Elon actually delivered.

It was a risk free venture.

That is simply false. SpaceX's chances were widely estimated to be quite low at the time.

If you are following along above, even if SpaceX failed, only the government would have lost money spent. The government contract did not take equity so Elon could liquidate and get all his money back. His cash investment was very little compare to government up front money provided by Griffin.

If SpaceX failed all the money in the company would've been gone.

They had no debt, and plenty of assets funded by the government. Other failed rocket companies liquidated and return value to investors. Elon only had to recover 10% of the spend to be made fully whole.

Read the links above, this is not speculation.

This is pure baseless speculation.

He already had hundreds of millions of dollars before he founded Tesla and SpaceX due to the Paypal sale to Ebay....

what uber rich lifestyle? he owns no mansions, no yachts, and i’m not sure he has any super cars. this is a man who sleeps at the office on several occasions.

This is marketing. His "home" is a tiny shipping container type thing because he actually lives in his rich friend's mansion most of the time.

I'm sure it is - but sleeping in his friend's mansion is most definitely not indicative of Elon needing money to fund his 'uber-rich' lifestyle.

You haven't refuted my points of him not owning anything indicative of his 'uber-rich' lifestyle, and considering the amount of work he is very visibly doing, I see no reason to somehow assume he's just laying around buying stuff for the heck of it.

He owns a jet (maybe 4 by some counts), several supercars in the past at least, and goes on stage with a famous comedian.

While owning a jet is a valid point, in his case I'm willing to believe its efficiency related as opposed to some luxury purchase (the time savings are simply insane, that's why Warren Buffett has one - would you call him indulgent?)

> Several supercars in the past Valid point - I remember seeing him crash his McLaren. That was, however, 20 years ago, and have seen no indications of him indulging in any supercars or anything of the sorts in the past 10 years.

>Goes on stage with a famous comedian Seems to be more of an attention-seeking thing as opposed to a luxury lifestyle.

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