Eccentric Billionaire Unleashes His Inner Trump

[El_Machinae]

There's also more in space than there is here. Mars is part of that journey

 

[Zelig]

Even when accounting for the stock awards, I was still paid under market rate and we were encouraged to sell our stock to enhance our quality of life. In other words trade future returns for current standard of living.

In a roundabout way, that's refreshingly honest for a company. Tying up more in wealth in single company than the minimum required for vesting, on top your employment status, is hugely risky and undiversified. I always sell any stock options/RSUs as soon as possible.

Oh I didn't know they gave up the non-profit designation. About time because they clearly never were.

FWIW, there are some excellent tech non-profits. The Signal Foundation (I don't think I can overstate how excited I am about this) and the Ghost Foundation come to mind.

Right that was my point too and why I can't stand the silicon valley culture. Even drop box just had a 500 million dollar ipo and isn't profitable! And it's 10 years old! It just astounds me all the time how much money these ridiculous companies get for ideas that aren't even unique or that well done when they don't make profit.

Dropbox is cashflow positive. You could choose much worse examples.

There is literally nothing good you can get on Mars that you cannot get far better here on Earth. Wanting to take humans to Mars makes no sense whatsoever. Planetary colonization makes no sense whatsoever and will never happen barring some kind of fundamental science breakthrough to allow faster-than-light travel for humans.

There are any number of fundamental science breakthroughs that could allow for Martian colonization that aren't literally impossible, like FTL.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

That way, if Earth is destroyed, humanity will live on.

That's naive and wishful thinking, and probably destructive, too. This planet has endured a lot yet still shelters us, who are we to desert it in a moment of weakness?

 

[innonimatu]

There are any number of fundamental science breakthroughs that could allow for Martian colonization that aren't literally impossible, like FTL.

My objection is that the science and engineering effort put into a big rocket project to get to mars will not aid with those at all. It's a diversion of resources into a dead-end objective.

They used to say the same thing about America you know

No, they really didn't. There were always critics of overseas expansion. The dangers were immense, and few lived to reap the big payouts. But people knew there were big payouts to be had, that drove wave after wave of mercenaries, traders and migrants to risk cross the oceans. They did not set sail into a void, they sought the riches of Asia. And, later, the riches of the new continent they stumbled upon.

Compare to going to Mars. There is no thing desirable there. No resource, no wealth, no population, no usable land... The entirety of the planet is a wasteland deadlier than the worst land on Earth. Completely sterile as far as we know. If he had found some inkling of life, then at least the biologists would have a motive to go and explore. I guess some geologists may still. But apart from some very limited pursuit of knowledge, in a few disciplines, and for the bragging rights of going there, there is nothing to be had in Mars. Those bragging rights are just not worth the risk and the waste of resources. The knowledge may be, but we'll gain it the same way we've been doing, with probes and robots. They last much longer, on much fewer resources, than a human being there could.

There were lands on Earth that were nearly void, they were left undisturbed for longer. Namibia, how many passed by the piles of diamonds on its beaches? Australia, where people had to be transported into. Ultimately these yielded some surprises. Perhaps Mars will some day. But only when (if ever) there are better means to travel to and fro than rockers. That is what requires investment on.

 

[luiz]

I go hiking. It's healthy, you see a lot more and it doesn't actively destroy this planet. You don't need a car to do.. Any of those things you mentioned. But yes, having a driver's license is essential for those "just-in-case" moments.

Dude even in France, that probably has the best public transportation in the Western world, you realistically need a car to visit villages and parks and stuff. Sure, in theory there are buses that might serve those villages and parks... Like one every eight hours or so. And I've been to some villages in the Limousin that are not served by buses at all. Cars gives you the freedom to actually visit what you want, when you want. I'll never give it up.

 

[uppi]

Dude even in France, that probably has the best public transportation in the Western world, you realistically need a car to visit villages and parks and stuff. Sure, in theory there are buses that might serve those villages and parks... Like one every eight hours or so. And I've been to some villages in the Limousin that are not served by buses at all. Cars gives you the freedom to actually visit what you want, when you want. I'll never give it up.

If talk about a specific village or park it can be true that you need a car to get there. But if you talk about the activity in general, there are enough villages and parks that are perfectly reachable by public transport that you never have to go for anything else. I have done hiking trips into the Alps using only public transport often enough. Yes, it does take more time, but I don't tend to be on a rush on my days off.

You may not want to give up the convenience of owning a car, but that is different from actually needing one.

 

[luiz]

If talk about a specific village or park it can be true that you need a car to get there. But if you talk about the activity in general, there are enough villages and parks that are perfectly reachable by public transport that you never have to go for anything else. I have done hiking trips into the Alps using only public transport often enough. Yes, it does take more time, but I don't tend to be on a rush on my days off.

You may not want to give up the convenience of owning a car, but that is different from actually needing one.

I need one to be moderately happy. I don't like waiting for hours for a bus or train to be available to go where I want. I don't like to be unable to go places because they're not well served by public transit. I don't like to carry heavy or bulky stuff in public transportation. So yeah, I need a car in the sense that I need it to do a bunch of stuff I love and not have to do a bunch of stuff I hate. I "need" my car much more than I "need" my smartphone or TV. Ain't giving those up either.

 

[Oerdin]

Venus would be better than Mars if a way could be found to eliminate the out of control green house effect and thus lower temperatures. We are talking serious terra forming though.

We would also have to create and artifical magnetic sphere.

 

[Hygro]

So you're using that fact to conclude that no one else could have?

All other actors are free to try.

Internet money, electric cars, solar panels, reusable rockets, vacuum trains are all old ideas. They are some of the lowest hanging fruit in terms of good ideas. Let's focus on the cars. For decades making normal looking (non-novelty appearances like the ev-1 on weirder), high end electric car was an obvious choice. So obvious I had the idea as a kid as the way to go. Was anyone doing it? Not until Musk learned to correctly pick and arrange and inspire the people needed to make it happen. Musk doesn't have genius ideas for companies, he followed obvious and talked about ideas waiting to happen. He just makes them happen.

Did anyone else inspire Hobbs to focus down a path rather than let it sit in the back of his mind?

 

[Zkribbler]

Venus would be better than Mars if a way could be found to eliminate the out of control green house effect ...

If the Vesuvians couldn't do it, why do you think we could?
And you forgot about the sulfuric acid rainfall.

 

[Bootstoots]

Much better to colonize Venus's upper atmosphere with an acid-proof balloon habitat filled with air and floating around at the 1 atmosphere pressure level, where temperatures are also Earth-like. Earth air is buoyant in a CO2-dominated environment. Wiki link

 

[Imaus]

Much better to colonize Venus's upper atmosphere with an acid-proof balloon habitat filled with air and floating around at the 1 atmosphere pressure level, where temperatures are also Earth-like. Earth air is buoyant in a CO2-dominated environment. Wiki link

The Venusian camp overlooks that people prefer solid ground to be on than floating in massive blimps. There's also the d/v cost to get from Mars to the belt than from Venus to the Belt. Venus has the advantage of being...'closer', to Earth, and this zone of acidic comfort, but little else.

But both camps probably overestimate the time table of massive colonization being a factor anyway. We've bumbled ourselves out of fifty years of progress, no amount of boot strapping will ever rectify that. I can see a Venusian cloud base, but I will bet Mars will probably have three times as bases than Venus will hold for the 21st century. Maybe if we're lucky we churn out some colonization in the middle of the century. Maybe.

And if we do...we should go everywhere. Venus AND Mars AND Luna AND Orbitals. Not just one or two because its somehow 'better'. If we're serious about the survival and dispersal of this Gaian Biosphere, we must force adaptation to environments alien to our own and diversify.

 

[civvver]

Dropbox is cashflow positive. You could choose much worse examples.

They have a negative eps, I didn't do that much digging. They must be paying off a lot of infrastructure or something then, my point still stands that investors love tech companies that sacrifice earnings for growth, and hate brick and mortar companies that have tremendous earnings but that have stagnated growth wise. Even apple stock started to taper off when their iphone sales numbers dipped, despite still earning massive amounts of money and sporting a super low for tech ~18 pe ratio. Netflix's is 250+. And netflix may not stay cashflow positive for much longer either as they owe a lot on the backend of subscriber costs, but growth potential is still there.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

SpaceX would not exist without the injection of the massive cash Musk made as shareholder of other companies. Cash burning companies like Space X simply are not possible on their own; they need some sort of external financing. So SpaceX is very much a product of shareholders maximizing their return (and then using their colossal wealth in pet projects).

So Musk made money in other companies and invested it in SpaceX and therefore that makes SpaceX beholden to shareholders despite him having full control over the company which is also not publicly traded?

@hobbsyoyo, this is actually a good explanation of why I want the government to be spending more money: because letting capitalists control investment means Elon Musk gets to shoot a car into space but right-wingers claim we "can't afford" to provide people with health care.

For this to make sense you'd have to show that private investment in rocket launch technology has ballooned costs for the government to access space. In reality it's been the opposite - the private sector has dramatically lowered costs to launch and maintain national space assets that the government has squandered elsewhere. Every dollar the government has saved servicing the ISS they have plowed into the hugely wasteful SLS project.

Not sure advocating for a state-first model in infrastructure development works well when partisanship in the US entails having your first order of business being striking a match and burning down everything the past administration did, over and over and over again.

Well said, wish I could upvote twice. I don't think people who are railing against private industry ascendancy in the space sector understand how horribly mismanaged the government sector has been in space.

History has shown this is false. It took SpaceX to make the most advanced and cheapest rockets possible. The basic argument is a common one: it takes a profit motive to do things like design commonality between stages, institute a flat management structure, remove dependence on inefficient subcontractors, etc. A public utility would by nature not institute these changes. A public utility would by nature not have the drive or vision to reduce launch costs through reusability. That NASA's SLS will cost over a billion per launch and that the domestic competition costs >$200 million per launch shows that this is true. Additionally, would a public utility offer launch services to such a vast array of foreign companies and governments? I think not.

I think you're actually underestimating launch costs for the SLS. Even if you factor out all of the infrastructure improvements (Congress just gave NASA another billion or two to build a launch gantry which will be used once), I fully expect the marginal cost of launching the SLS directly to be closer to a billion dollars given it will launch once every 3-4 years and all those engineers have to be employed between launches. That's expensive as hell.

Dude, guess who sent the first guy into orbit? The Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Government money also took the US to the moon. The idea that you "need" a profit motive to do anything is just dogma which fools you into supporting a basic income guarantee for rich people.

As amazing as communist achievements in space were, they were hugely wasteful. I don't even mean this in the typical 'government is wasteful' sense - I mean that the Communists threw money at projects only to abandon them after a decade of development or else would set design bureaus competing with each other for no real reason or gain. Plus, they were constantly trying to 'outdo' the US in space achievements even when it didn't make sense or when they couldn't afford it. The Almaz space stations (military space stations), the N-1 moon program and Buran shuttle all stand out as the biggest waste of resources. But there were tons of other ones like hastily equipping the Voshkod with an airlock to beat the Americans to spacewalk and almost killing a cosmonaut in the process.

The weird thing is that the main reason the government systems keep ballooning in this way is that they do things by contracting, and the contractors have all those capitalists I was talking about who need to extract profits...

I agree with this to an extent. The government itself is a huge part of the problem as well. The Space Shuttle was a great example of how badly the government can screw things up only unlike a private industry, the government isn't pressured to end something because it makes no sense technically or fiscally. Instead the government tends to double down and drive up costs all on its own even without the help of graft-y contractors. It was not the contractors that made the Space Shuttle one of the most expensive, unreliable manned launch vehicles ever conceived - that was all the government's doing.

You mean the suicide mission? That demonstration will be a good way to cease the wasting of resources on that pipe dream of planetary colonization for the next few decades.

There is literally nothing good you can get on Mars that you cannot get far better here on Earth. Wanting to take humans to Mars makes no sense whatsoever. Planetary colonization makes no sense whatsoever and will never happen barring some kind of fundamental science breakthrough to allow faster-than-light travel for humans.

'Getting something good' on Mars is not the point of going to Mars. We also don't need impossible technologies to make Martian colonies. I don't know why you think that to be the case.

That's naive and wishful thinking, and probably destructive, too. This planet has endured a lot yet still shelters us, who are we to desert it in a moment of weakness?

Who said anything about abandoning the Earth? This is a common refrain from anti-space exploration people and it's never made a lot of sense. Setting up a Mars colony doesn't mean humanity is abandoning the Earth. If anything, having access to a lifeless world will help us better understand the conditions necessary for Earth to function the way it does and show us how to maintain them. The discovery that Venus was a hot greenhouse was a huge deal for climate science as it really framed just how badly global warming could screw with the environment.

 

[Bootstoots]

The Venusian camp overlooks that people prefer solid ground to be on than floating in massive blimps. There's also the d/v cost to get from Mars to the belt than from Venus to the Belt. Venus has the advantage of being...'closer', to Earth, and this zone of acidic comfort, but little else.

But both camps probably overestimate the time table of massive colonization being a factor anyway. We've bumbled ourselves out of fifty years of progress, no amount of boot strapping will ever rectify that. I can see a Venusian cloud base, but I will bet Mars will probably have three times as bases than Venus will hold for the 21st century. Maybe if we're lucky we churn out some colonization in the middle of the century. Maybe.

And if we do...we should go everywhere. Venus AND Mars AND Luna AND Orbitals. Not just one or two because its somehow 'better'. If we're serious about the survival and dispersal of this Gaian Biosphere, we must force adaptation to environments alien to our own and diversify.

I mean, if we're talking what we'd actually expect to happen in the next century, I'm mostly with inno - there really is no economic benefit to creating a base anywhere outside Earth, except revenue from ultra-high-end tourists. I want to see all sorts of colonies because space is interesting, but I have no expectation of them happening any time in the 21st century besides maybe a Moon base for the rich tech types. I'm hopeful that Mars missions will happen - either Musk-related or someone after him - but they'll simply represent the way a tech billionaire and his buddies, or alternately a country, decided to spend their money. A permanent base there is a further order of magnitude in costs, and I doubt it will happen. And the Venusian cloud thing is cool to imagine but probably won't ever happen.

Imagine someone at the end of 1972 predicting that there would not be another manned mission to the Moon, let alone Mars, for at least 45 years. That person would have seemed like a ludicrous pessimist - probably someone who should go on old-timey antidepressants. But that's exactly what happened, because it's energetically and financially expensive and there's nothing out there worth the cost. The main forces driving the Apollo mission were nationalism and a desire to prove our missile technology was superior to the Soviets'. Once that happened, scientific curiosity and the general "coolness" factor of going to the moon wore off, and the funding dried up.

Still, though, I hope humans manage to explore space as far as possible, and I hope my pessimism is misplaced. The economic incentives aren't there, but the scientific objectives absolutely are, as are any spin-off technologies that appear. More than that, putting humans in space is just inherently cool and interesting to me and a lot of other people. It would be expensive to e.g. go to Mars, but we'd get much better ROI than we would by, say, blowing up Iraqis.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I agree with everything you said but I'd like to point out that just because the economic incentives aren't there now doesn't mean this will be the case that much longer. Really the major thing hampering the economic development of space - and the use of the vast resources thereof - is the cost of access to space. Because things cost so much to launch, there is a huge incentive to make sure the things you launch work correctly, further escalating costs.

If I have to shell out $200 million to launch a satellite that is worth a $10 billion in revenue over 10 years, I want to make damn sure the thing doesn't break. Space is hard enough as it is, with radiation, temperature swings and the lack of an atmosphere all working against your high tech spacecraft. Because of this, you double down (or even triple down) on your critical systems, which are all cutting-edge and cost a ton of money to make individually. Then you test everything, over and over and over again to make sure things don't break in all sorts of edge cases that just don't exist on the ground. All of that engineering time and hardware costs a ton of money so all of a sudden your satellite costs $500 million to build plus the launch costs but another $100 million in insurance fees.

Now imagine your launch cost is only $500k. Now all of a sudden your big multinational satellite operating company can afford to launch fleets of non-redundant, little-tested satellites. A bunch will break but you don't care because they only cost a million to build each and your fleet can still haul in that $10 billion in revenue. Not only that, but because costs are going down you're free to experiment and go after revenue streams that were never open to you before.

You're no longer stuck in GEO providing communications services - you're launching vehicles that can sell new images of the entire Earth every single day. You can afford to send out some scouts to poke around asteroids and see what they can turn up.

All of a sudden all sorts of avenues to profit that never existed before and can't be imagined beforehand are accessible. Your argument is a bit like trying to value the amount of oil in the Saudi fields before the internal combustion engine was invented. Sure there are niche uses for that petroleum before then, much like there are niche economic uses for space now. But the real future for economic exploitation for space is around the corner as launch costs keep dropping and opening up the market for new uses.


And this is the point where people begin complaining about how we have messed up the Earth enough and shouldn't go around messing up the solar system. I'd much rather mess up a bunch of lifeless rocks by shifting our extraction and production off the Earth as much as possible but whatever.

 

[Goodfella]

I mean, I agree with you. Cars are convenient, and many people in California prefer them. However, you live in LA and realize than more cars, electric or not, won't make transportation better. LA traffic problem is two-fold: poisonous emissions and congestion. Electric cars solve the first problem (if it isn't too late), but they don't address the second. Now, everywhere else in the world, and even on the East Coast, many people don't even have a driver's license because they can get anywhere on foot or by public transit. It's not unimaginable. Cities in China and Japan are bigger, yet they manage to efficiently move people around because culturally it's more acceptable to take public transit. Same applies to New York and some other East Coast cities, where people simply don't own cars.

I understand Californians will debate the usefulness of cars, but if we had a better replacement, people would still use it. Think about Uber: it's not used very much around the world but is in high demand in California. Why? Because there are no poor public transit options, and people don't want to drive anywhere. I have traveled around the world, and people hardly use Uber anywhere else because they have local options. They simply don't need it.

It's not unique to LA. 95% of American households have cars and no amount of urban engineering and public transportation incentives will really change that. Improving car efficiency and safety will have a larger impact than just hating on cars and praying that Americans will one day abandon cars in mass and take the train everywhere.

SpaceX is probably the only successful venture of his, but it's still very niche, if you ask me. That's not some Thomas Edison level revolutionizing of the public life.

This is slight goal post moving when you basically claimed SpaceX isn't a business, not that's a business as revolutionary as the lightbulb.

 

[Bootstoots]

I agree with everything you said but I'd like to point out that just because the economic incentives aren't there now doesn't mean this will be the case that much longer. Really the major thing hampering the economic development of space - and the use of the vast resources thereof - is the cost of access to space. Because things cost so much to launch, there is a huge incentive to make sure the things you launch work correctly, further escalating costs.

If I have to shell out $200 million to launch a satellite that is worth a $10 billion in revenue over 10 years, I want to make damn sure the thing doesn't break. Space is hard enough as it is, with radiation, temperature swings and the lack of an atmosphere all working against your high tech spacecraft. Because of this, you double down (or even triple down) on your critical systems, which are all cutting-edge and cost a ton of money to make individually. Then you test everything, over and over and over again to make sure things don't break in all sorts of edge cases that just don't exist on the ground. All of that engineering time and hardware costs a ton of money so all of a sudden your satellite costs $500 million to build plus the launch costs but another $100 million in insurance fees.

Now imagine your launch cost is only $500k. Now all of a sudden your big multinational satellite operating company can afford to launch fleets of non-redundant, little-tested satellites. A bunch will break but you don't care because they only cost a million to build each and your fleet can still haul in that $10 billion in revenue. Not only that, but because costs are going down you're free to experiment and go after revenue streams that were never open to you before.

You're no longer stuck in GEO providing communications services - you're launching vehicles that can sell new images of the entire Earth every single day. You can afford to send out some scouts to poke around asteroids and see what they can turn up.

All of a sudden all sorts of avenues to profit that never existed before and can't be imagined beforehand are accessible. Your argument is a bit like trying to value the amount of oil in the Saudi fields before the internal combustion engine was invented. Sure there are niche uses for that petroleum before then, much like there are niche economic uses for space now. But the real future for economic exploitation for space is around the corner as launch costs keep dropping and opening up the market for new uses.


And this is the point where people begin complaining about how we have messed up the Earth enough and shouldn't go around messing up the solar system. I'd much rather mess up a bunch of lifeless rocks by shifting our extraction and production off the Earth as much as possible but whatever.

How much can launch costs be further reduced, in your estimation, and how would that be done? Certainly reusable first stages accomplish quite a bit, and I'm sure there are other tricks like that to save quite a bit more Still, it seems unlikely to me that we'd see cost reductions in the range of several orders of magnitude, like we have for electronics and gene sequencing, since there's a large energy barrier that has to be surmounted with rockets. But you know a whole lot more about this than I do.

As for poking around on asteroids, I gather the most likely route to asteroid mining is to hope that the price of launching stuff into space declines enough that the economics of mining them for platinum group metals start to make sense. Do we have a feel for how low launch costs would have to go before this becomes plausible? Here I'm just kind of assuming that getting robots to mine asteroids is easy once the cost of launching stuff out of Earth's gravity well is solved.

I don't get the impression that we know as little about the potential economic uses for space (outside Earth orbit) today as people did about the uses of hydrocarbons in the 1860s. We've been launching things and thinking deeply about space for 60 years now, and I think we can be pretty sure there's no such thing as unobtanium, or some kind of space-oil-equivalent that will power our future brain implants. This isn't to say that people won't find interesting new economic applications for space, just that they won't be anything like as important as petroleum. I mean, we're making a lot of fascinating discoveries in materials science and related fields, but the raw materials are found here on Earth.

At the very least, inno's narrower claim - that there's nothing on Mars that we'd want to get for economic reasons - is very likely correct. Asteroid mining is at least plausible, but Mars is a big hunk of iron oxide and perchlorate salts and other mundane minerals like that with a two-year round-trip transit time.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Here's the thing though - we actually have not seen the impact of re-usability on launch prices. SpaceX's cost reductions to date have been purely in improvements to the manufacturing and test process, a willingness to take risks and the use of non-aerospace parts providers. Their launch costs are already rock bottom for the industry and they've only just begun reflying boosters. These boosters that they are reflying are already out of date - the newest version (block 5) will be much faster to recycle as they will require less inspections and tear downs. Because their costs are already so low they do not currently have to give big discounts on reflown rockets. That will come only when other reusable rockets from Blue Origin and China come on the market.

I think launch costs could go as low as $10 million with block 5 in a few years. BFR will likely break the sub-$1 million launch cost barrier. Currently launch costs for a large geostationary satellite are sitting at about $60 million, for reference. That's about half of what most other providers can offer. The Russians, Indians and Chinese can go lower but there are a lot of caveats with those providers I won't get into.

I do think the uses of outer space are relatively unknown right now. Resource extraction is the obvious low-hanging fruit but we have done very little research into in-space manufacturing. There will be all sorts of novel drugs, computer chips and super materials that can be made only in 0 g that we don't know about right now simply because it's been to expensive to get up there and experiment. The ISS was supposed to be the place to figure this stuff out but for a whole host of reasons it has fallen short to the point where the NASA office that coordinates research on the ISS has fallen under criticism for the under-utilization of the facility for research.

We are not going to find unobtanium in space. We will find instead invent new processes for manufacturing drugs and materials that are only possible in 0g that will improve life on Earth substantially. Eventually, as we build up our in-space industrial capacity (which is currently 0), we will begin moving down the economic ladder and producing more ordinary materials and extracting resources in space as it avoids all of the industrial impact and pollution that has thus far greatly harmed the Earth.

I do agree that there is nothing economically attractive about colonizing Mars until the colony itself develops an economy which is probably something that will take many decades.

 

[adcarrymaokai]

Indeed, WHO owns the press? George Soros? The Jews™? Globalists?

Elon Musk has degenerated into full-swing fascism within just a few days. And this is why people like him are dangerous.