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If you're retiring in your prime, maybe. More Boxer less Napoleon.
The path of least resistance for talented people is DINKing your way to FIRE at 40 and maybe getting a golden retriever or a couple of cats. Playing video games, smoking weed, phoning it in at your job (if you have to work) and taking a couple months of vacation a year.* I know an unfortunately large number of people who fall into this bin.
This is very much not the behavior we want to incentivize. We need people to do the hard work of having children and raising them well - or perhaps more realistically, decreasing the financial and social burden, but that's another story. We'd all be poorer if Elon Musk had spent his 20s/30s blitzed in Ibiza doing lines of coke off hookers, or whatever it is fun people do at raves. The American frontier wasn't tamed by childless, unemployed scions of wealthy families, good times create weak men, insert your preferred aphorism about rich, lazy fucks here.
*I'm not so tedious as to argue that vacation itself is immoral, but c'mon. Everyone should try to accomplish something worthwhile with their lives, everyone should see what their body is physically capable of in their prime and we need to cultivate a sense of ambition and civic responsibility.
I think the popular sentiment is that if Elon hadn't been around to ramp up Tesla, SpaceX, and whatever else he's dipping fingers in, some other capable person could have done the exact same thing. Because apparently profitable business ideas grow on trees, and just need to be plucked and driven to success.
I don't agree with the idea that Elon is that easily replaceable on the individual company level, and I don't think people grasp how insane it is for ONE GUY to be pushing this much wealth around in so many different companies, AND staying at least a step or two in front of his various competitors who ALSO have a lot of wealth to throw around.
It's the famous 'his engineers do all the work' argument, to which I respond 'why not just sack all of NASA's engineers and hire new ones'? If the effectiveness of a company is decided by the skills and efficiency of its rank and file employees, then it follows that NASA struggling to get back to the Moon is due to the incompetence of its workforce, not problems with leadership and management.
The above is silly, good engineers and researchers are necessary but not sufficient for top-tier, cost-efficient space capabilities.
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Absolutely. And as a reminder to those people who keep saying that Elon got his wealth handed to him by his parents and so what he has achieved isn't a big deal, the fact that he chose to do what he did rather than doing coke off hookers is a point in favour of him being someone to respect. You don't show character by working hard if the alternative is that you die to starvation, but you do show character if you work hard when the alternative is endless blackjack and hookers for the rest of your life.
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