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Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

Well, most of Elon Musks assets today are also not cash and highly dependent on the federal government going his way on key issues. He's certainly not dumb doing what he does if his goal is to get richer and more powerful. But unlike 200 years ago, we can watch live how that stuff plays out.

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For comparison, the war with Iraq (a far less formidable opponent than the globe-spanning British Empire) cost the US-UK alliance $1.1 trillion [1]. Musk's net worth is $353 billion [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_of_Elon_Musk

George Washington didn't have Lockheed Martin's hand in his pocket.

Wars were much cheaper when all you needed were men, horses and small arms.

And when you didn't have to fight the war on the other side of the planet.

Britain and America are not exactly close...

Did any of the founding fathers intend to bring the war to Britain?

And that's the primary reason that Britain lost the war.

The war was much more expensive for the British than for the Colonists, and became even more expensive once France joined. The British didn't lose because they couldn't keep fighting, but because the cost of the war grew to be higher than the expected value of winning.

It was also expensive for the French, and that cost helped bankrupt the state, which led to the French Revolution. One of many causes.

The French revolution happened because real wealth was basically left untaxed, leaving an enormous tax burden on everyone that wasn't nobility. The situation was not unlike what Piketty described to win his nobel prize.

That is also one of the many causes of the French Revolution, but on its own isn't enough to explain why it went down exactly how and when it did.

Had the runway to bankruptcy been longer, a more decisive king than Louis 16th might have managed to successfully reform the state without it being shattered.

Perhaps the crisis wouldn't have landed at the same time as weather-driven economic downturn.

Maybe if it had been a few years later, different people would have gotten into power and Brissot wouldn't have started a disastrous war with Austria that spiraled everything out of anyone's control.

Or any number of other scenarios.

The British also realized that as long as the Americans would borrow from the Bank of England, and were willing to trade their raw goods to England where they could be processed into industrial goods and then sold back to them, there wasn't much of a need to win the war in the first place -- though they didn't realize this all at once (as evidenced by the War of 1812). It was when the Americans (in the North) got to disrupting this economic situation that things really kicked off that they needed to back the Confederacy in what was effectively America's third revolution. Despite losing that one too, America's economy and politics were impacted enough that it was just a few decades later the British agent and American turncoat Woodrow Wilson was able to bring the former colonies back to heel with the Federal Reserve Act, the 16th Amendment, and entry into WWI as Britain's ally.

It was a nice sovereign republic while it lasted, or so I've read.

> Wars were much cheaper when all you needed were men, horses and small arm.

Certainly not. You could not print money out of nothing for a fairly long time.

Not relatively. They were incredibly expensive compared to the resources at the time, not least because of the difficulty of moving supplies around and the huge amount of opportunity cost in the lost work of the men recruited into the military.

Being able to outspend the other side is definitely a good indicator of winning odds. There is some friction of course, but it’s a very rough approximation of how much industrial might you can put into the field. And just having money isn’t enough either, you have to be able to spend/convert it into a military power in some way.

So it stands to reason that wars will be as expensive as possible. It’s pay to win to a degree.

That's a point, but frankly the wars were expensive because you have an organized, uniformed military that has to abide by UN regulations and the Geneva convention fighting people (guerilla units) that aren't held to any of those things. There's a cost to being legitimate and it's more than people would think.

They were also financed with a finite resource, or at least, one that grew at a much slower rate, governed by the laws of physics as they impacted the economic feasibility of gold mining. Rather than an indefinitely large supply of "money future generations will pay back."

> certainly not dumb

Perhaps but IMHO it’s a very high risk strategy and I doubt it’s necessarily optimal if more wealth is his primary goal (as opposed to his other seemingly highly megalomaniacal ambitions..)

So far his actions haven’t really been that beneficial for Tesla (of course its sales growth might have significantly slowed down even if he stayed out of politics). SpaceX can only make that much even if it gets to appropriate the entire budget of NASA. Also at the end of the day his and Trump’s relationship might fall apart any day.

Any risk Elon's taking is peanuts compared with George Washington taking on the world's leading colonial power...

I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as directly comparing Musk and George Washington. But I suppose there are some parallels [if we take the more cynical] perspective. Both were willing to take on significant risk to upend the established socio-economic order primarily for the benefit of their respective social classes (wealthy landholders and tech-oligarchs).

But yes, confiscation of all his property and even the gallows (fortunately or unfortunately for everyone else) is not a risk Musk is facing yet.

And its not like confiscating his property would do much. Like most billionaires his wealth is almost entirely stocks which while theoretically liquid would loose most of its value if you tried to sell it all at once.

When you’re that rich you aren’t motivated by more money.

He’s motivated by power, and the fear of power being taken away.

That doesn't seem likely to me as I don't see how someone can get to be that rich without being incredibly motivated by more money. Surely a normal person would get a few million and decide that they had more money than they'd ever need?

But yes, likely motivated by power too.

Money and power are the same thing.

only in a corrupt system.

In every system. The whole point of money is you can use it to get what you want. The whole point of having power is that you can use it to get what you want. They are the same thing if not completely interchangeable. You can use money to buy power and you can use power to accumulate money.

You can use money to buy things people are willing to sell.

You can use power to get people to do they would not otherwise do.

Generally, if money is able to get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do, there needs to be some sort of duress, or corruption. People who are content with what they have don't resort to prostitution or otherwise compromising their principles for money. Those who are held under crippling debt, or who come to have no principles, are much more inclined to do so.

Power is more subtle, and it is related to money, but no, they're not the same thing.

If you only care about money then there’s no difference between a few hundred million and anything above that. What can you not do with money with a few hundred million? Not much.

The people who get to be billionaires are motivated differently to normal people. They are more like feudal kings.

I doubt money has been Elon's primary motivation for at least the last 25 years, possibly longer. He is seeking approval and recognition, maybe power. His love for Mars might go beyond the recognition he gets from it. But Money is just a gateway to all of these things, and in a way a byproduct.

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