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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

If people cannot accumulate wealth, we wouldn't have SpaceX.

Such a declarative statement is very reductionist. Yes, some folks will accumulate wealth but there needs to be some additional limits on it.

I am in favor of progressively increasing tax brackets that eventually get up to near 100$. Spend it or lose it. And if you lose it, it goes in to the very bottom income bracket where it will be used imediately. Trick up economics if you will.

You don't think Musk's fortune was used? He invested all he had in Tesla, then again in SpaceX.

> there needs to be some additional limits on it.

Then we don't get SpaceX or Tesla.

No, but we do get NASA

Musk's rockets cost less than 10% of NASA's. Plus, SpaceX has not cost you a cent, while you've paid plenty of taxes for NASA.

The highest NASA's budget has ever been as a percentage of the federal budget is 4.5% during the Apollo program, totalling 650b nominally over the years. Saying anyone here now has paid "plenty" of taxes to nasa sounds … disingenuous at best.

4.5% is a terrific amount of money.

You paid $zero for SpaceX.

In this context, surely the whole point is that we could have taxed Musk’s wealth instead, so we have collectively paid whatever amount we didn’t tax him.

A bit less, definitely, but not zero. The US government has paid billions for use of SpaceX launches since it was founded. One could argue that the spending on NASA has benefited the world much more (e.g. free NOAA climate/weather data for research, etc) vs just increasing the wealth of privateers.

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