Both also have at least some understanding of what they're paying for considering the tours and testimony from former employees. They also frequently thank the employees for their successes.
As much as I love space exploration, I think it's actually a problem that so few people get to decide where so much money goes. Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation so that the downstream effect is a society with many more aerospace engineers and astrophysicist, who dont have to instead focus on working corporate jobs just to afford housing.
We might foster a society where space exploration is an ongoing societal goal instead of a playground for the elite.
US spends 1.75 trillion on education per year, and 2.12 trillion on healthcare. People make it out like we aren't putting a ton of money into this stuff when those are literally are two biggest expenses. Space X is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
It seems very few people actually understand the importance of funding R&D that isn't directly improving their life, such that it takes some stubborn rich people to actually show that something is worth doing. Kind of like other countries all working on Falcon and Starship inspired rockets after seeing that the concepts can work.
As other examples, we have particle accelerators (everyone knows about the colliders like LHC and assumes they're luxury projects with no relevance to improving lives, yet they led to the development and side-by-side refinement of synchrotron light sources, which are very important for modern science) and medical tech like what led up to mRNA vaccines and Ozempic.
I would say we need a society that trusts experts and also holds said experts accountable, but then again, most of SpaceX's founding employees were not conventional aerospace experts, which was part of why they were able to question a lot of the corrupt/inefficient practices that traditional aerospace people dismissed as being standard and necessary practice.
The amount of money we already spend on thos problems absolutely dwarfs the amount of money that SpaceX has raised. Spending a fraction of a percent more on any of those things isn't going to move the needle much.
On the flip side, space access is one of those great economic accelerators and making that access dramatically more affordable will open up new realms of possibility.
Sometimes I wonder if the peasants got exited watching the European crowns compete to survey trade routes around Africa the way we get exited about space.
You’re seriously arguing the descendants of those peasants aren’t better off for it?
But HNers love being told what to think so once one person took it the wrong way the NPCs followed.
Musk was worth ~$300M when he started SpaceX and Tesla, and he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire. His big share of SpaceX makes up like half of his wealth, so from today's perspective he's not putting his wealth into a vision, he's wealthy because of that vision. That's different from Bezos, who made his big money from Amazon and then started putting billions into Blue Origin (which was rather inspired by SpaceX success). That said, Blue Origin was actually founded before SpaceX, but they were very slowly working on their suborbital rocket for a decade before Bezos gave them big cash, while SpaceX started sending satellites to space and supplying the ISS in that time. SpaceX has made 500+ orbital flights so far, while Blue Origin just one.
Bezos has been somewhat similar, he has been pouring billions into BO, and while BO has moved at a slower pace, he's clearly committed for the long term too, considering all the investments into things that only make sense if New Glenn acheives reliable booster reuse (the giant futuristic rocket factory, Project Jarvis, the lunar cargo lander).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/12/29/how-much-equit...
They had more cash than Musk put in.
They didn't even have the right to the name. Had to buy it from some Euro company
That's the skin in the game that matters.
Even more than giving up productive effort elsewhere
If we're going to criticize people I wish we'd stick to real things to criticize, because there are plenty with Elon. Making stuff up like this just makes anti-Elon people look ridiculous.
There's a survivorship bias occurring too.
You see the same selection going on with huge commercial real estate winners: they keep doubling down and the majority eventually fail out. You see only the winner, not the failures. “Keep rolling till you crit-fail.”
Lots of successful businesses like Nvidia or Standard Oil have a similar story too: https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/how-rockefeller-and-his-...
Maybe that is because I'm biased towards individual stories: statistical distributions and selection effects are hard to notice.