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Comment by adamtaylor_13 | Hacker News Reader

You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.

We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible.

(Anyone asking antagonistic questions can go ahead and save their fingers, I won't respond to the petty comments.)

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> economically meaningful for our nation

3,000 short term jobs doesn't put a dent in the thousands of jobs he has cut, not to mention the losses to our economy due to the tariffs, immigration policy, and deficit spending that he caused.

> We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon

I'm of the impression that you can't corrupt your way out of corruption.

If it wasn't consolidated largely to a singular "him" we could be doing more of these, see: FDR's New Deal

By this method the money largely comes from the government and is captured into private interests, literally hollowing out the government tax base for corporate power

we need more nazis?

He was, until he took a chainsaw to things he didn’t understand.

I was a huge believer in Elon musk. I invested and made a lot of money in Tesla before Model S had even entered serial production. Now? Fuck you Elon, go Peter Beck…

Musk is a marketing genius.

Discounting challenges to your beliefs by burying your head in the sand is certainly a choice.

Few Americans have done more than musk to destroy state capacity and to enable corruption on a massive scale, all while enriching himself to an unprecedented degree. That's great for him and his cronies that he has gotten so wealthy doing it, but he's been a huge net-negative to most humans.

I get that rockets are cool and a lot of people in the tech bubble think that starlink is the greatest thing ever, but most people don't care about that nearly as much as they care about seeing their children die from preventable diseases he cut the funding for or getting violently ill because he drove thousands of food inspectors and researchers out of a job.

Handling the enormous federal debt that he continues to play a part in worsening is going to very painful in the long run.

Lol why is this downvoted? There is no dispute that he spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Trump and seat himself in government while his companies are financially dependent on government programs and contracts. This is an obvious conflict of interest, and also completely on par with all of the other corruption we're seeing from this administration.

Exactly. I actually laughed out loud at OP's comment. Elon Musk has never done anything to benefit the broader "us." The idea that "we" need people like Musk to "dig us out of this situation" --a situation that rich men like Musk put us into in the first place-- is absolutely ridiculous.

Billionaires don't "dig" anything except the foundations for things that are going to make them even more money.

So where is the guy who is respectful to the government and compliant with regulations that is out there building millions of EVs, rockets, and massive satellite constellations? If he existed I could respect your argument. But in reality the only guy who seems to be able to build a modern mass manufacturing company in the US is the trillionaire who runs roughshod over all forms of government oversight that gets in his way. That should tell you something about where the problem lies here.

Elon Musk isn't the problem, he is the symptom. The problem is that it is basically required to be ruthless and corrupt to get anything done in this country at the scale, price, and timeline needed to be commercially viable. The solution is less regulation and bureaucracy, not more.

I think the root of the problem is “vetocracy.” We’ve created a system where small minorities can hold everything up, sometimes for ideological reasons and sometimes for financial reasons. The classic case of the latter is homeowners opposing all home construction to raise their property values, but it happens in other areas too.

Vetocracy isn’t democracy. It’s a tiny minority having veto power.

So yes the only person who succeeds in such a system is a human battering ram who can just bash their way through it by being a manic asshole with insane force of will.

There should be tons of Elon Musks, including nicer ones, but nice people get vetoed.

he's in china working on trains and renewable energy

rockets and wifi satellites are only solving problems because corporations have sucked public infrastructure dry for generations

ah yes the "wifi" satellites

yeah yeah you're being reductive because you want to dismiss it, but that's essentially what they are... it's not like the dude is solving world hunger (which he is uniquely resourced to actually do), he wants to be space AT&T and is capitalizing on the degradation of public infrastructure using the funding that should be building it

It's a bit naive if you think lack of money is the cause of "world hunger". There is plenty of money, and governments have far more than he does. On the other hand, connecting previously unconnected (and some unconnectable) regions is a huge boon to their population. Starlink is great.

Golden Dome might be "economically meaningful" but it will also lead to WWIII so, no thank you.

No it won't. Separately other countries don't get to dictate our internal policies or whether we decide to build any sort of missile defense system. If we're going to be nuked over it, then oh well they'll get nuked too. Never can we live as hostages to wanna-be dictators and tyrants (Xi Jingping, Vladimir Putin, IRGC, &c.) and if they want to blow the whole world up then so be it but acquiescing to their bullying is simply not an option. If you think it's an option, then we should issue our own nuclear threats and take them hostage instead.

Is your cognitive dissonance that strong that you don't see that if all major countries follow that line of thought all have to have their own golden domes and invite WW3?

How does everyone having golden dome invite WWIII? We can't shoot missiles at them, so therefore let's go start a war with them? What sense does that make?

And if we do, how are we going to fight them? By shooting missiles at them?

It's an offensive first strike system

A missile defense system is an offensive first strike system? How do you figure that?

That's literally what T*ump said about it. Also the heritage is the DARPA FALCON project.

I don’t think that’s an appropriate use of the term ‘cognitive dissonance’, but suffice to say, no, if the US develops the Golden Dome as currently described there is no danger of all major countries also developing the same technology and then starting World War III.

I wish he kept a lower profile. His public behavior risks overshadowing the work SpaceX is doing, work that could benefit humanity in ways we can’t yet fully anticipate. I wish we had more Elons pushing us toward a "future that looks like the future," as he said.

If we just don't talk about the blatant racism, the nazi salute, or that rampage about removing brown people from jobs they didn't deserve, it might stop being such a huge problem. Sure buddy.

There is a reason Musk is so rich. He got most of his funding from taxpayers:

https://www.moneytalksnews.com/slideshows/billion-and-counti...

It is not him, SpaceX is a government funded project yet he keeps all the money. You should be outraged.

There's a lot to criticize, but this argument seems extremely misleading to me. The government wants to put things into space. SpaceX says "this is how much we're willing to take to do so" and bids on the government contract to do so. Notably, this is drastically cheaper launch pricing than the Space Shuttle and whatever other venues NASA had. These weren't R&D grants which are more arguable.

We the people owned the space shuttle after we paid to have it built. Do "we the people" own any of those spacex rockets?

The government spent drastically more money on the space shuttle (which is widely acknowledged as a mistake of a design) than what the private industry ended up delivering.

It’s rent vs build and I’m not so sure the government benefits so much from owning space shuttles. But arguing that the government purchasing launch volume is the same as them buying the R&D for the shuttles is not a logical coherent and consistent position.

For what it’s worth a common refrain I’ve heard from people who hold your position is that government patents are also the property of the people. So not only does the government spend a lot on R&D, in such a model it’s incapable of monetizing this R&D as a way to recoup those expenses.

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