Elon Musk, Tech’s Cash-Poor Billionaire

Re:Elon Musk, Tech’s Cash-Poor Billionaire by gpm on Friday May 08, 2020 @08:44PM (#23121114)

> There should be hundreds and hundreds of Elon Musks at least.

I'm not sure I agree.

I like Elon Musk (a whole lot more than most people) - but every Elon Musk consumes a lot of societies resources. He's spending 10s or 100s of billions of dollars worth of resource on (literal) moonshots. A hundred of him would raise that to trillions to 10s of trillions of dollars.

I think we can afford the former as a society (and that it benefits us). I'm not sure we an afford the latter. Worse, we become less efficient at is when there are more of him because we start running out of talented and driven engineers.

Maybe 10s would be a good order of magnitude.

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Re:Elon Musk, Tech’s Cash-Poor Billionaire by api on Friday May 08, 2020 @10:16PM (#23121615)

I think you are underestimating how much we waste. The resources are consumed regardless.

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Re:Elon Musk, Tech’s Cash-Poor Billionaire by playeren on Saturday May 09, 2020 @03:41AM (#23122972)

Maybe it is the other way around; we can't afford _not_ to spend 10s of trillions on moonshots. Depends on how sustainable one thinks the status quo is, and the risk timeframe for potential consequenses.

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Re:Elon Musk, Tech’s Cash-Poor Billionaire by gpm on Saturday May 09, 2020 @07:50AM (#23123964)

It also depends on how much you think you increase the risk by disrupting the status quo, and how much you think extracting 10s of trillions would disrupt the status quo.

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