But if you take his statements as "thinking aloud", I much prefer this mode of operation. On the other end of the spectrum is Apple, with zero "thinking aloud" or sharing _anything_ until it's ready to ship. It's ok... but much less fun.
>thinking aloud
He's a CEO and is legally bound to not lie or mislead the investors though. For example Skreli is in part serving a federal sentence for lying to the investors who didn't lose any money.
We still have no laws preventing another greedy person doing the same.
They went after him for PR purposes.
Personally, I wish they left him alone, and instead changed drug law that will prevent these huge price hikes in the future.
In a weird way, lonely Hoody Boy exposed a huge flaw in the system, and we should be thanking him?
Apart from that, there are chances that Spaceship will be a good product, probably making it cheaper to put stuff in orbit than it is today. On the other hand, this may wildly accelerate problems with space junk, especially if the irresponsible plans for putting more than twice the amount of objects in LEO are allowed to go through.
Define "Mars colony". A thriving metropolis with millions of residents? Or a permanently crewed research station with a few dozen staff? The former is not going to happen in our lifetimes. The later isn't certain but I think it has some chance of happening. But Musk is going to try to set up the later and call it a "Mars colony", with the declared ambition of eventually developing it into the former. Aspirational naming.
> there are too little resources on Mars, and too harsh conditions, for it to make any kind of sense.
In 2021, Musk has a net worth of $170 billion. He's only 50, he could easily live for another 30 or 40 years. It is entirely plausible that by the time he dies, he will be a multi-trillionaire. To whom, or to what, is he going to leave his trillions? (Heck, forty years from now, quadrillionaires could even be a thing, and old man Musk could be one of them.) He might leave them to a charitable foundation dedicated to paying for the colonisation of Mars. If that happens – well, even if you are right that colonising Mars is pointless, if a multi-trillion, or even multi-quadrillion, dollar foundation is willing to pay for it, it may actually happen, no matter how pointless it may be.
Another possible scenario: sometime in the next few decades, the US successfully lands on Mars, and sets up a modestly sized US-led international research base. The US government continues its policy of excluding China, so China responds by landing on Mars independently and establishing their own competing Mars base. China and the US then become trapped in a new space race, in which each seeks to outdo the other with the size and capabilities of their respective Mars bases, not motivated by any practical economic or military benefits, but simply by national pride and prestige. A US-led Mars base could grow into thousands of people, and US Congress might become politically locked into paying for them out of the federal budget, even if their existence doesn't actually benefit the average US citizen in any tangible way.
(The above two scenarios are not mutually exclusive, it is possible both might happen at the same time.)
You need to create new social media accounts and try to look for information supporting the opposite idea. I'm not suggesting that Elon is totally honest about everything he says, but there is more to him than what you seem to have heard.
I'm saying this to help you, because, you have been misinformed by these feedback loop algorithms. If you keep your identity tied to this idea that Elon is a total fraud you are going to become more and more upset overtime as the evidence to the contrary accumulates.
His only contributions have been early investment in Tesla and hiring the right people for SpaceX to achieve some decent cost savings and vertical landing on Earth. It's definitely not nothing, but it really shouldn't make anyone believe 99% of what he says, or consider him some kind of genius.