I wonder if he hid other profits in other crypto accounts. Or perhaps he viewed this as testing the waters and building a reputation before he scaled up.

It’s possible that he just enjoyed the thrill of doing crimes and getting fun money. During the first crypto-mining boom, my friend in corporate IT caught multiple people trying to use office electricity and networks to mine Bitcoin with hidden hardware. One person even tried to hide their mining machine above the drop ceiling tiles. They couldn’t have been making much money relative to their salary, but they liked the idea of being clever enough to get free money for themselves at the expense of someone else.

I've always believed that most crimes are committed more because of the thrill of it, the desire to feel like you got something extra illicitly because you're more clever and ruthless than everyone else, etc, than because of a rational evaluation of the financial upside.

SpaceX is not Facebook, Goldman Sachs, or Google. There are probably no stock options or other nice perks. The salaries are probably not that great. Also, after taking into account taxes and other expenses, there is probably not that much left over, so $27k is a nice bonus.

From what I know you'd get the equivalent of a junior software engineer and with no benefits. So like $90k-$120k/yr. More if you're Sr, but again, this is total. And let's be real, $30k is still a good bonus even at a $200k take home. That's an extra 15% (possibly not even taxable given the nature).

SpaceX compensation is notoriously poor, as are the working conditions -- crunch is bad enough for games, but imagine if you are working on flight critical software or hardware. I've looked at their careers page many times, but the backchannel gos always made me reconsider, and since then Elon has gone really wacko.

If SpaceX paid more than Google, then it would be evidence more people find working for an advertising conglomerate fulfilling than sending rockets! to! Mars!

If you want to make easy money, you need to find something that is (or appears to be) one or more of evil, dull, embarrassing, pointless, or incomprehensible.

It's a different set of skills though. Aerospace engineers and related software, electronics people don't see many openings of relevance in FAANG. The competitors are more like Airbus. And while SpaceX work is appealing (not Mars though, that's dumb) there are things in your life other than work.

Also, e.g. Google TAG does amazing security work, I'd be happy to work there -- if I had a clockwork mind like taviso! But we can ethically rank working at the various tech Zaibatsu another time.

>It's a different set of skills though

Maybe? Obviously there are people at SpaceX who don't work directly on rockets, and there are people at Google who aren't SWEs. People might find some prestige or glamour even in jobs that aren't the ones you think of.

Right now it appears SpaceX is hiring customer service people for Starlink, and an HR rep to work at Cape Canaveral. And a network operations analyst in Washington, and so on. They also have "rocket engineer" positions, but there are plenty of other things.

The only time I was contacted by a Google recruiter, it was for a job in their legal department, so the experience was completely unlike what you hear about them.

Obviously there are many general operations roles, and I'm sure they could be interesting. But...

SpaceX has a focus on rockets, so anything critical to that is first line. But being a systems admin isn't that, even if it is important. They don't have SREs, or people who work on languages or ML. Traditional rocket dynamics predominates. (Worryingly, they don't seem to have any formal methods / MC / validation jobs either, which is a bit of a red flag, cf Ariane failures. Human factors also seems a bit lite.)

In contrast Google is focused on the things CS/EE love, and mech eng/physics takes a back seat. Just far more roles available.

This is simply not true. They offer both stock options and (private) rsu.

People are motivated by way more than just money.