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Notes -
Question for the group:
What size contract, awarded to Musk-related-entities next year by the Trump-II admin, would you consider similarly presumptively corrupt?
I'm honestly not sure how to feel about a guy who made his money largely thanks to government regulations and contracts getting heavily involved in politics.
This and the CA decision seem targeted and corrupt to me, but I'm going to feel even ickier when the Trump admin awards SpaceX a billion dollar contract or tariffs Tesla competitors.
All government contractors are run like this. This is the entirety of the economy of Washington DC, which is surrounded by 8 of the 20 wealthiest counties in the country. The entire industry is an elaborate defense mechanism against government and contractors sucking their own dicks being seen as corrupt. Occasionally, incidentally, some technical work gets done.
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This depends heavily on our definitions of corrupt.
If you mean "corrupt" in the sense of what is prosecutable under current SCOTUS interpretations of corruption statutes, it's almost impossible that any deal would qualify because Musk's companies do produce things that serve some legitimate government purpose.
If you mean "corrupt" in the sense that the word is used colloquially to refer to someone receiving an obvious benefit that's outsized compared to the delivery, I would consider it an object-level question of what was contracted, what was delivered, and what was the price.
If you mean "corrupt" in the sense of political patronage, I would agree that it is this for anything where Musk's company isn't the clear best choice. Of course he's going to get the benefit of the doubt.
If you mean "corrupt" in the sense that a libertarian might use it, I would say anything above roughly $37 is a corrupt relationship because Musk has always relied on the government for massive grants and subsidies for projects of questionable utility.
Truth be told, my gut instinct is towards the latter. I remain unconvinced that Teslas are anything other than silly toys with superficial environmental signaling value. My inclination is to distrust large programs directed at friends of the government. But really, if pressed on the matter, I would lean towards the patronage model as a more realistic way to think about the world. Patronage seems very important to understanding how power structures actually work, is so ordinary in history that complaining about it being corrupt is about as useful as bitching about nepotism, and I don't really even have that much of an objection to it
On the other side, I think a lot of the issue here is about this being as much a jobs program as a broadband program. Satellite broadband doesn’t employ a lot of backhoe drivers.
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Have you drive a Tesla? I own one and they are great cars (and honestly not that expensive). I don’t think they are anymore a toy compared to any other car. It truly was a feat building a new freaking car company and yes they did benefit from subsidies but so did a lot of other EV cars that failed. Musk is great at building companies.
Similarly SpaceX gets a lot of government contracts. So does Boeing. One is a good company. The other is Boeing.
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This would be more or less my definition, reversed as the case may be.
I'm deeply uncomfortable with government contractors lobbying openly, in the same way that it's often argued that people on welfare shouldn't be able to vote. Which of course becomes an argument about what is a government contractor and what is welfare.
But Musk, here, feels like a special case, in either direction, and I don't really have an answer other than being deeply uncomfortable.
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Why do you think the republicans are going to do that? The democrats have actually already placed a 100% tariff on Tesla's competitors, specifically the Chinese.
Because they said they would?
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There is no amount that I would consider presumptively corrupt. If Trump-II gave Elon a $1 trillion dollar contract to put a man on Mars, I'd be perfectly OK with that.
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Seems like a reasonable concern. My estimation would be something over $1.5 billion. Something like, "here's the original money, plus another contract." I'd be ok with that. Much over $2 billion--specifically for Star Link--might seem unreasonable without some caveats, like, say, increased deliverables.
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The challenge I have with getting upset about SpaceX and Tesla's contracts is that, compared to where the money has been shunted otherwise, they seem like great fucking deals.
If the dollar amount and lack of delivery got anywhere close to "Business as Usual" at NASA or the EPA with the legacy MIC contractors and environmental grifters, then I would be upset.
Everyone's seen tweets summarizing the reality of the situation. NASA is pouring $2.7b (originally $383m, lol) into a far-less capable launch system than what SpaceX just proved is feasible, and spending hundreds of millions more on DEI grift, or bragging about the first PoC and Woman on the moon.
Funnily enough, there are plenty of MtF transgender people working for SpaceX and Tesla. They just want to actually accomplish something.
Whoa, whoa. That $2.7B isn't what's being poured into the launch system, it's what's being poured into the launch tower. The money that's gone into SLS is more than ten times that (or a touch less if you don't adjust for inflation; development started in 2011).
To be fair, the Mobile Launcher 2 tower is indeed mobile, and its Ground Support Equipment includes plumbing for liquid hydrogen, a cryogenic that makes even other cryogenics look easy.
To be snarky, ML2 doesn't even have any giant robot arms.
That is … why? Couldn’t they have built a mobile transport, maybe with a simplified support pillar so the rocket can’t topple over, and then at the flame trench a launch tower as a static structure? That would have simplified the requirements for both.
I'd assume they worry about the difficulty of either transferring the rocket from one platform to another as a whole and/or robustly (re)assembling the rocket on the static launch platform.
Fun fact: each of the two 5-segment SRBs on an SLS stack weighs twice as much as the entire dry mass of the Starship stack put together. A liquid rocket stage can be stacked while empty to make it light enough to lift easily, but with a solid rocket stage the only way you can empty it is with the on switch (and you can't refuel it so much as you can remanufacture it, and there is no off switch...).
Surely they assemble the SRB segments in-place, but yeah it's still quite heavy. They work well for what they do, but I do question their use for crewed flights generally.
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I would say that size is irrelevant, as opposed to value delivered. A contract for $10 million that delivers nothing of value, I would presume corrupt. A contract for $10 billion that actually delivers, say, a moon base, I would not. These FCC grants have long seemed corrupt to me because huge amounts of money get paid out to companies that result in hardly anybody getting new connectivity. Questionable value for the amount provided, and then execution and delivery far below expectations.
Is your opinion at all altered by the other comments pointing to contractual provisions that were not reached?
No. To the extent the provisions were not reached (which evidence seems sketchy at best to me), they still delivered much more, in a much shorter period of time, than the other competitors.
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This feels like a legal technical answer. If person A fulfills 5% and person B fulfills 85% it would seem per se corrupt to cancel Bs without cancelling As.
I agree, but once we get into legal technical questions it's realistically beyond the ordinary person's ability to parse. You get dueling experts and the result is mostly determined by burden of proof.
Simple spherical cows a=5% b=85% sure, it's simple. But what if there's evidence that B has maxed out their approach at 85% while A is working on infrastructure that could eventually deliver 100%? B is a mature company while A is a startup? Or if the experts argue that one or another of the statistics turn out to be massaged? Etc etc.
I tend to agree with your comment that Musk/Tesla's achievement in creating a new standard setting luxury car company cannot be overstated. How many other manufacturers have poured cash into trying to make Cadillac/Lincoln/Infiniti/Chrysler/etc into legitimate luxury competitors and failed? Tesla has upended the upper end of the car market in a way comparable to the quartz watch's impact on horology.
But it's never going to be easy to figure out who gets government grants, which is why I tend to oppose them.
Sure one could in theory conclude A is better than B. But would you be on that? 9/10 B is going to be better at the end of the day and if you are going with the 1/10 you really really really need to show “here is the unimpeachable crystal clear rationale.” Especially when you have an admin that has been hostile to Person B.
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