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Comment by hersko | Hacker News Reader

Thank goodness for billionaires.

There's a good case to be made that if it weren't for the likes of Musk and Bezos we'd still be stuck with the likes of ULA.

They are literally pulling us into the future and i'm all for it.

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Yes thank you billionaires, if you hadn't vacuumed the wealth of a nation this could have been a government agency success. Why should we all benefit when one man can?

The sums spent on this are trivial to governments. California HSR costs much more than bringing a rocket to life. The annual cost of dialysis to the American government is many times what SpaceX or Blue Origin costs.

Any number of nations' governments could do this in a wealth perspective. And none have.

Of course they haven’t, how can they afford to compete with private companies? We’ve all decided that taxes are bad, there’s no money in a govt position.

They have a lot more money than private companies. California HSR alone costs ten times or more than the Starship program. Annually, the American government spends some three or four times as much as the Starship program on dialysis for 0.2% of the population. Money is in abundance for a government.

If this were true, NASA would never need to outsource. Why pay SpaceX when you can build your own rockets.

Because SpaceX can build them cheaper.

Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Musk and Bezos have generated insane amounts of wealth for the American economy. They're not hoarding dollar bills in some vault like Scrooge McDuck lol.

No indeed, it is not a zero-sum game, billionaires like Musk and Bezos have more money than Scrooge McDuck [0], the cartoon version of Greed. While their share of the global wealth is increasing by each year

"The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population, reveals a new Oxfam report today." Jan 16, 2023 [1]

[0] https://www.benzinga.com/news/21/11/23829868/elon-musk-is-ev... [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-bag-nearly...

So? I don't think you are really making an argument. $42 trillion created, and by those same accounting rules they got the share that they created. There net worth is just the stock value x number of shares they have. Their wealth is directly correlated by how much value the market thinks their companies are worth.

This is not a problem for me.

I would disagree with some of your reasoning. Workers created the wealth, and by workers I mean everyone from delivery people, software developers, managers etc.

However, due to political decisions most if not all of that wealth is shared among people at the upper levels of the hierarchy, and third party investors.

It might not feel as a problem to you, but increasing inequality has negative consequences for society as a whole. It is well documented that more unequal societies have a higher prevalence of violence and theft, which might have direct consequences for you or your environment.

There are billionaires all over the world who haven’t built successful space companies. The key ingredient is the government funding which has made the US space industry possible, such as building the launch pads, subsidizing hundreds of companies which build specialized parts, creating the GPS network required to track launches, etc.

Maybe thank the taxpayers instead?

It actually is a feature of capitalism. Envy can blind though.

Totally worth the exploitation, amirite?? /s

(You do realize we did this before without them, right?)

No nation has a done what spacex has.

Can you explain how i am exploited? I use Amazon products daily (as do you), why shouldn't i be thankful to Bezos? He has made my life tangibly better.

I really don't care how many shares of Amazon he has and what the current share price is.

I guess it would presuppose some solidarity with the workers at Amazon

At a glance: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/12/study-amazon-workers-serious...

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-10-25/pain-exhau...

It sounds like a bad job so they should work elsewhere. These are not slave labor camps.

Most people require work to pay for food and housing. Not everyone is able to find a wealth of options for selling their labour.

But as I said, I think the argument requires some basic empathy/solidarity to follow.

By your own logic, they must like it?

Do you think they wouldn't if they had viable options??

Billionaires simply cannot exist without exploitation somewhere (though most often throughout the system that enriched them.)

This isn't even controversial.

Many simply choose to think it's acceptable, even preferable, through whatever twisted justifications.

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