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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30221 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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In Poker, they'll teach you that it's usually a fool's errand to try to guess exactly which cards another player has or what he's thinking. Instead, you try to put them on a plausable range. So like, anything from "medicore hand played aggressively" to "strong hand played weakly," but ruling out the extremes.

I think we can do the same thing with Elon Musk and SpaceX. Who knows what he's "really" thinking, we can't read his mind, and he probably changes his mind himself from time to time. But he seems consistent enough to rule out the extremes- he's not a conman who's just lying about going to Mars, because he's put so much money and effort into developing Starship. But I also think he's smart enough to realize that it's very unlikely a Martian colony will ever be established during his lifetime, or that it would ever actually be profitable.

I think his play is:

  • 10% true believer, he really wants to go down in history as being the guy who established the first off-world colony. He already has an insane amount of money, but he still wants to feed his ego and feel like he's doing something more important than selling cars or cryptocurrency.
  • 40% hypeman- he doesn't really care about that, but he's got a lot of super nerdy engineers working for him who care about it a lot. They're willing to work way harder for his companies than they would at a normal job, because they think they're on some sort of grand quest for the human species. I've heard that working for NASA is often like that- everyone is super passionate about what they do, even the most mundane experiments, so they'll work long hours for low pay.
  • 50% conman/salesman- he doesn't care about Mars at all, the real play is LEO here on Earth. Data from Starlink, intelligence data from Starshield, or just straight up selling missiles to the military- all of that has the potential to be insanely profitable. If a major war breaks out and he's got a near-monopoly on that technology, he can pretty much name whatever price he wants to the US government.

If a major war breaks out and he's got a near-monopoly on that technology, he can pretty much name whatever price he wants to the US government.

in minor war, yes

in major war if he overplays then he gets nationalised under some emergency war powers

True, they're not going to literally hand him a check for a trillion dollars. But he can still ask for an awful lot. Lots of military contractors made bank during WW2.

Oh, with that I fully agree (and depending on dates/inflation/what would delivered trillion may be actually on table...)

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