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What’s amazing about musk is his perhaps pathological need to double down at every opportunity.
He supported trump at great risk to himself in the event of a loss. Having won he’s now ratcheting things up further. He clearly thinks trump and the state department will give him cover (as they should) with European regulatory issues. He’s playing an all or nothing game. To what end. I don’t know.
Trump intends to appoint more than half his cabinet from tech-bros. So I'd say that the people doing the work for trump are naturally aligned with Elon.
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Trump is going to be pro-tech and pro-space. The democrats and god forbid greens(non existent), would rather destroy Space-X and anything else Elon has touched out of spite. They would tell you its better to feed and clothed the random assemblage of voting constituency they have than to reach mars. They have made themselves the enemy of space exploration, so screw them, let them burn.
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That's why I suspect that there will eventually be a public falling out. Eventually Elon will insist on something that Trump can't or won't deliver for political reasons and that will be the end of it. He used to be a darling among some on the left but fell out with them for incredibly stupid reasons, and there's no reason to think it won't happen here. The interests of the American public aren't always aligned with his interests, and he doesn't have the political tact to play the game the way the rest of corporate America does.
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Isn't there a classic stock trading scam where you send 2^N Boolean tips ("will go up or down today") for N days, then focus on the small-but-nonempty group that got N correct tips in a row to try to convince them to trust your judgement? It seems like given enough VCs (monkeys) and opportunities (typewriters), even random chance will give you a few coherent words of Shakespeare and a fawning audience expecting great wisdom.
Of course, I do think your average VC billionaire is much brighter than random chance, but there is a huge selection bias when you find the one (of an unknown size set) that has consistently doubled down and won and assume this to be representative generally.
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I think it is similar to why Napoleon invaded Russia. He had everything, he had won (well, almost but he could have ignored Britain), but he was so driven being Emperor in Paris was boring and he needed the next challenge. So he did go to war until he got into a war he lost.
Leading a car company is a full time job. Building rockets is a full time job. But he finds normal day business boring and delegates so he can solve the next challenge. But you can’t “solve” politics, and sooner or later he will fly like Icarus to close to the sun and fall down.
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It's the path to success if you can escape the orbit of normal man and afford to make big mistakes. Musk is unofficial Imperator now, and he's behaving like it.
That, and woke doubled down at every opportunity. Maybe that eventually failed, but only after achieving so much change that is never going away.
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