Why limit Elon Musk - who is arguably ensuring the long-term survivability of our species - for some arbitrary target like absolute equality? Why is a powerful bureaucrat with no money more desirable to you than a rich entrepreneur that had to prove his value before attaining reward? What is wrong with the youth have little-to-no savings and the elderly/about-to-retire having significant wealth and assets?
Elon Musk carried a lot of the financial risk to get the company into the position it is in now. The engineers did not. Funny how risk is always completely neglected in these "entrepreneur bad, engineers good" narratives.
Ah yeah, much like the bankers of the world, the money-men always claim they are the ones "at risk" with their billions of dollars.
Elon Musk is the second richest person in the world and has raised tens of billions of dollars of outside money to fund his companies. You talk like he's footing the bill; he put less than $10 million into Tesla. It was a brilliant decision, but hardly "risky".
>The engineers did not.
So the engineers who went to work for a project that may not have panned out were taking no risk huh.
It would be less embarrassing for you if you understood basic risk concepts before making snarky comments on the internet. The "bankers" you refer to, for instance, don't personally own the money they disperse but are middle-men for it and consequently don't usually own the risk. Elon, on the other hand, invested $100 million of his own money into SpaceX in the beginning of the company, way before he was a billionaire. AFAIK that was most of what he got out of PayPal.
That is the root meaning of risk - if things didn't pan out, he would have been (financially) ruined. Engineers would go ahead and get another job from somewhere else. If you can't see the difference here, I can't help you further.
Okay, let's take a look at risk. Elon invested $100 million dollars of his own money. If he loses it all he ends up.... just like the rest of us, with nothing. How exactly is that a huge risk? For us, that's daily life. He'd probably end up much better off in reality though. I'm sure he owns his house, for starters. So he'd invest $100 million, lose it all (was it all of his PayPal money, or just most of it? That's important because if he had even $1M left over that he intended a cushion that's not much of a risk at all really, to lose out and end up a millionaire? Not a risk.), and at the end of the day end up living in a house bigger than most of us could ever afford. He could sell that, go from "financial ruin" to being a liquid multi-millionaire. Or he could have asked one of his PayPal millionaire friends for a "small" loan of X million dollars. Or he could have done what you propose those engineers do and just get a job from somewhere else. I just don't see this massive "risk" here that justifies him now being the second most wealthy person on the planet worth more than billions of people combined.
But let's look at risk further. What about the people strapping themselves to the top of Musk's rockets and propelling themselves into outer space? They are literally risking their lives. All Musk did was put in $100 million dollars. Has anyone ever died from investing $100 million dollars? On one side you have a guy would lose a lot of money and land comfortably on his feet. On the other you have someone strapping themselves to a column of rocket fuel and blasting off to outer space, something many people have died doing. Surely if risk determines reward, and Musk is worth $150 billion dollars, these astronauts must at least be billionaires. Right?
Obviously that's a litter hyperbolic, but it's to prove a point. If we're going by risk/reward, why is financial risk the only thing considered? What about scientific risk? Musk's enterprises are premised on mountains of scientific and engineering work that came before him, work that is mostly publicly funded and for which the original pioneers (taking risks) will never be compensated. Take Tesla's much hyped "autopilot". Did Musk come up with that himself? Did Tesla engineers even come up with it? No, that research came from the government, namely DARPA through their autonomous Grand Challenges robot competitions. In 2005 during the first Grand Challenge the robots were running off the road and crashing into each other. By 2007 they were reliably navigating urban environments. This was after millions of dollars and thousands of person-hours were poured into the research. Did Musk fund that research? Did Tesla? No, you and I did as taxpayers, and we put in much more than the $100 million Musk did. The people doing that research on the ground were risking their careers and forgoing paychecks to do that work. Many of the people doing the actual coding on those robots were being paid $20k per year as graduate students. Who is now benefitting from that research? Musk. Tesla. Private interests.
Or look at the Kennedy Space Center. I just watched a SpaceX launch a rocket from there. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Who built that? I mean physically, who put hammer to nail there and built that thing. It's huge. "It took 1,500 engineers to design the buildings and launch pads. The drawings alone produced by architects and designers weighed more than a hundred tons" [1]. Did Musk take the risk building that? No, the public did, and now it's there for him to use and benefit from. But the people who built that for him with public money won't be seeing a return on investment proportional to the benefit it today generates. Those benefits are privatized largely into Elon Musk's pocket.
The first part of your rant makes it clear you are confused of the topic at hand.
The second part does follow some sense - but then, how many engineers did it take to build the US road system? Why aren’t you screaming at car companies, logistics companies, taxi drivers or all other appropriate parties for taking advantage of infra built with public money?
Frankly, its fairly obvious you have a massive distaste for Musk, which is fine - I or nobody else should dictate your opinion on him. What I’m extremely tired of is this new ”social democratism movement” which is some very thinly veiled weird combination of utopian socialism and at times vitriolic hatred against the entrepreneurial populace.
Yes, there are bad actors in the current system. But what is it exactly you are advocating as the alternate system?
Do you not believe that there comes an inevitable day where the Earth is no longer inhabitable by any form of life and that, if humans are to escape that outcome, we must become interplanetary and then interstellar? (I think it's still a long shot, but I know with certainty that the "stay on Earth" outcome is exactly the extinguishing of human life.)
You could start with investing heavily in this planet, which is significantly more habitable than mars. Electric vehicles were a great start, but there's a lot more than EVs and reselling battery and solar equipment from China that can be done.
>Do you not see any value in developing the technology necessary to get to Mars - in order to travel elsewhere?
I see some value, and if Mr. Musk wants to pursue it, great. But let's not pretend he's saving humanity here; the God complex of SV is already bad enough.
> Why is a powerful bureaucrat with no money more desirable to you than a rich entrepreneur that had to prove his value before attaining reward?
Because the "value" they have proven is so often criminal and fraudulent in nature - best case scenario it's down to luck. The world is not even close to the meritocracy you think it is.
> Why is a powerful bureaucrat with no money more desirable to you than a rich entrepreneur that had to prove his value before attaining reward?
Because the bureaucrat had to prove their merit among the whole population while the rich entrepreneur just had to prove their merit among other kids that were privileged enough. Just think of Bill Gates that went to probably the only school that had a computer in the world.
In ancient China they even went so far to castrate bureaucrats to prevent cross-generational cronyism.
> Why limit Elon Musk
Because he is using cool goals like travelling to mars to motivate his workers to work themselves to exhaustion while ignoring safety measures? He acts exactly like capitalists of the industrial age. The difference is that his workers do not lack money for sustenance, but a purpose in life.
let's say someone is born into extreme poverty, and through decades of hard work becomes wealthy enough to give his child a great education and a 1 million dll inheritance. is it not his right to use his money on his child?
then lets say this child turns this education and inheritance into 1 billion dollars worth of wealth. does this have no merit??
ive seen many people squander privileged upbringings, i think if you 10x what was given to you, you have some merit regardless of where you stared from.
> let's say someone is born into extreme poverty, and through decades of hard work becomes wealthy enough
That seems more luck than hard work to me. Just read the paper.
Even if that was possible. Do you want in a world where people with merit call the shots or a world in which people that cheated their way to wealth or simply inherited wealth call the shots?
Money can be transferred, gained through stealing and luck which all does not require merit. It is not a good proxy for merit.
I don't understand why people go to such great lengths to give current injustices the benefit of the doubt ad infinitum, even constructing ridiculously rare and hypothetical scenarios like that.
The real outrage here is the millions and millions of people squandering their talents in some shite job due to lack of opportunity, not the handful of billionaires that started from nothing and whose children might now be taxed somewhat.
I don't know man... I dont think its that rare for someone to climb out of poverty. Maybe I just see it this way because I did it myself (born in a 3rd world country, single mom, step father with bad addiction issues, barely graduated HS)
Now that Im a father myself, Im of course trying to give my child the best opportunities, but also trying to raise him to be grateful and disciplined.
So I'm not talking about the billionaires. Im talking about regular people who can now grant their children not private jets, but just a good private school.
What would be fair in this scenario? How can we make things equal/just in this case?
Also I dont think its rare or hypothetical at all, that rich kids never learn to work hard and squander their good fortune.
-- EDIT, i completely agree its absurd and completely wrong that 1% of people have 50% of the wealth, that should not be that way.
I also have a working class background, but in Sweden. The last thing I would like to do is to pull up the ladder that enabled me and so many others a better chance to a secure and comfortable life. The inheritance tax was actually recently abolished here, but not due to some popular uproar but because right-wing parties got into power.
