Ignoring all the drama, this part is interesting:
"On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars."
"On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars."
Oh you know I don't really care about the number, it's just that I'm working on this plan to desalinate all the water in the oceans.
https://glasstire.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/288_Image1....
But no, I really doubt that's all it takes. Unless you discount all of the R&D costs as SpaceX operational expenses.
He obviously has plans to do neither of those. What makes me question why does he even want to go there... But a magnetosphere strikes me as "earlier infrastructure", while terraforming is "is that even possible?"
Definitely, and by a large margin.
If I said Mars combines the warmth of Antarctica with the moisture of the Sahara, the air pressure of the peak of Mount Everest, the environmental quality of a superfund cleanup site, the surface illumination after the 1883 Krakatoa explosion and subsequent volcanic winter, and the UV radiation from a completely destroyed ozone layer…
…if I said all that, I'd be understating how harsh Mars is.
The most positive thing I can say about colonising Mars is that the mere ability to actually do so will mean being able to recover from any possible catastrophe that comes our way.
Government crew and supply launch contracts probably, though these don't need to be "profitable" in the conventional sense for the entity footing the bill.
All that's needed to be profitable for the launch provider is to convince Congress that it's in America's interest to establish a public-private project for a moon base and a Mars base. Now more than ever, when framed against a background of an ascendant Chinese Space program that will soon be sole operator of a space station.
Once the "Race to Mars" is won, NASA can grow soy-beans, do bone density studies, and any other science shit the NASA nerds can come up with post-hoc, but the main point will just be being there, and having the Stars and Stripes on the first flagpole planted in Martian soil.
I can see plenty of people going to Mars — religious groups, cults, anyone who wants to explore the final frontier, the most extreme preppers (which Musk arguably is given his "multi-planetary" arguments), and anyone who would like to build their own mountain-sized space castle.
What I can't figure out what any of those people might sell to Earth such that people on Earth are willing to trade for it, except for information which people on Earth can also produce without paying so much for a ticket.
SpinLaunch on the moon wouldn't even need the vacuum chamber they use on Earth, but it would still need that on Mars.
The biggest down-side of the moon is the long night, but the solution to that is the same as one possible solution to the lack of magnetosphere on Mars: a very, *very* thick wire.
(I've not done precise calculations for this, but I have considered the scale needed for "thick wire" on an Earth-scale global power grid, and for that I was getting Earth's magnetic field at a distance of 11 km from a 1.36e6 A current, which in turn meant I had a 1m^2 cross section; naturally this is only going to happen if you have some serious automation for processing lunar/martian regolith into aluminium).
(if you haven't played Bioshock this probably wont make much sense - but if you have and listened to all the audiologs, i'm sure you'll find a bunch of parallels)
Also astronauts were willing to risk their life putting the stars and stripes on the moon I doubt that Musk can inspire the same zeal...
His Tesla stock was 0% ytd until the election.
Post election it is up roughly 70% ytd & has paid for Twitter & the Mars colony multiple times.
Hard to say if that happens without him owning Twitter.
As per usual, he bet the house and won. The vibes are shifting, Trump won, etc
Its fairly easy.
In almost every western country the incumbent administration has been punished by voters due to inflation, this has been the case in the uk, germany, romania, france, mexico... list goes on. So Trump could have won without Elon buying twitter.
Similarly he could have donated to Trump without buying Twitter, and been on stage and been all day on twitter saying nonsense without purchasing. So being close to Trump is possible without buying Twitter.
The market would have reacted the same way, because the market is reacting to the fact that Trump is a corrupt leader and being close to him means the market will be skewed to benefit his cronies (in this case Elon). If im not wrong Trump has already mentioned creating "self driving car initiatives" that probably means boosting Tesla dangerous self driving mode, and also they have alluded to investigating rival companies to tesla and spacex or at least "reviewing their goverment contracts". Other industries without social media owners, like private prisions, also skyrocketed after trump won and those paid trump as much as Elon but were not on social media. The market would have reacted to Trump being corrupt regardless of Elon buying Twitter.
So its easy to say that his stock would be up 70% without buying twitter, as long as he kept the 250 million investment in the Trump campaign, and then market assesed Trump admin as affecting market fairness, both of which would happen without his purchase.
That is a hyperbolic way of saying the fbi used the report feature everyone has access to when worried about domestic terrorism along the lines of the Oklahoma City bombing. Not exactly government censorship - not a potato potahto thing.
"Zuckerberg told Rogan: "The background here is that the FBI came to us - some folks on our team - and was like 'hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that'." He said the FBI did not warn Facebook about the Biden story in particular - only that Facebook thought it "fit that pattern".
Mark admitted the source of the censorship on Rogan's podcast and again doubled down on this fact with a letter to Congress.
https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1828201780544504064/photo/...
Alex's law firm was able to get this story removed in 1-day from The Sun. But it's true, Alex's passport is online due to this deal-
And also that X was never as popular as Facebook.
On the other hand, the polls seemed pretty close, so perhaps it made enough of a difference on the margin.