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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

I think about how we could've paid for two brand new, gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants for the same amount of money as Elon Musk flushed down the toilet to try to shut down a website he didn't like. Extreme wealth is a mental illness, and wealth caps are healthcare.

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It's worse when you realize that Musk at least does something with his insane wealth, even if it's also insane.

Most either do nothing really of note, or donate it to "causes", which may be good, but kind of boring.

I can appreciate boring nowadays.

Musk tried boring for a bit. Don't hear much about it nowadays.

Har har

He’s not “doing something with his insane wealth”. He’s wealthy because he’s doing something. The moment he announces he’s stepping back and going to be boring he loses half his wealth or more.

God does not come down from the heavens and bestow money that one spends on what one chooses. People value his companies because he’s there. TSLA will instantly collapse in valuation if he exits.

At this point I wish he had shut it down. Instead he turned into a mouthpiece for the right and duped his followers into thinking he’s “liberated” the site and made it into some bastion of free speech.

You can't do that with two gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants!

If you can guarantee two brand new gigawatt scale nuclear power plants for $44b then you can raise that money easily. The problem isn’t the access to money that prevents it. It’s that the the number of NRC approved reactors built since it came into existence is countable on your fingers.

I’m not even kidding. If you can pass the regulation, environmental, land permits, local opposition etc. you will be a hundred millionaire maybe a billionaire.

[flagged]

Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and don't cross into personal attack on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I fail to see how British sarcasm qualifies as a personal attack. Specifically in reference to plain English that is the specification of the NRC as cited

I'm a fan of British wit, but these things don't necessarily translate across contexts. On a broad and shallow internet forum like HN, a line like "if you can read and understand plain English how about you go make yourself a couple billion dollars" pattern-matches to boxed wine sarcasm, not ripping port sarcasm.

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