For anyone that's interested I'd really recommend just going back and reading the original piece, the regime of profits uber allis that we've lived under for decades is much stronger than even what he was arguing for in that piece.
Nicotine being generally available could have provided significant amounts of social benefits by allowing people to self-medicate. Current healthcare systems are absolutely not adequate for picking up the slack and that's if the healthcare system is even willing to treat those people (ADHD treatment in some European countries is tricky).
While it was certainly bad how much cigarettes were pushed and I do think this caused more harm than good, it still probably had benefits.
My own opinion is that profits and social value have become mostly misaligned a few decades ago already.
I know that last one is controversial in the US, but I'm a Brit and a conservative voting one at that, and over here and in Europe generally it really isn't at any significant level.
Some enterprises, particularly general social services and infrastructure just work very well as charitable trusts, or non profits. This has been shown to be effective for hundreds of years. Then for-profit enterprises can work alongside them to mutual benefit, such as medical products companies working along with health services. It's just a matter of which model works best in practice in a function, ideology be hanged.
As we're on the subject of SpaceX the NASA model worked very well for a while, but ran into the ground with the Shuttle. Now we seem to be back with a productive synergistic relationship between public and private functions.
There's been plenty of failures of profit seeking as a social good that may have been avoided if companies felt a duty to society beyond profit seeking.
In the very long-term SpaceX will likely get to Mars and will get to make a claim for a significant amount of real estate and natural resources. Along the way I'm sure they will come up with many more revenue streams.
One way or another, space is going to end up being a valuable industry if only by virtue of the fact that access to space will be a critical national security issue - imagine if China monopolized access to space and could take down satellites at will.
Iron isn't worth much by the pound. But what if you could mine a solid chunk a few times the size of Everest?
I don't know, I find that very unlikely to be the case. If ever there was value in "being first", this is the mother load.
The closest analogy I can think of is the arrival of European powers in the New World. Sure, it's strange, inhospitable and downright dangerous, but even if you fuck everything up along the way and thousands of people die, you're still reaping outsized rewards.
Space is an order of magnitude more inhospitable than the Americas, but (a) so is our understanding of the technology and the universe and (b) humans don't actually need to be in Mars for humanity to effectively reach mars.
Maybe if asteroid mining becomes a viable business, Mars' shallower gravity well and higher orbit around the sun might give it a significant enough competitive advantage for bulk goods like fuel and water that may be needed in the asteroid belt. Still, that's a lot of "ifs" and "mights", for what is, even in the best-case scenario, very long-term venture.
Its usually best to assume anything a corporate founder, executive, or PR rep says in public about the corporation, its mission, or their personal ambition regarding it is a calculated effort to promote the business interests of the corporation by shaping public perception, and only coincident with the truth to the extent that there is a likelihood that the truth happens to be convenient, or that falsehood or silence would be detectable and have adverse consequences.
There’s also quite a lot of opportunity of Starship is successfully “fully and rapidly reusable”. Point to point transport of cargo and potentially even humans, etc.
Falcon 9 already launches more than 50% of all Payload sent to orbit today.
They will have the launch airline or cargo service company too not just build starship and get regulatory approvals, promote, sell tickets/capacity and provide customer service etc.
All risky steps in a possible side use case for the starship program. Realistically none of this happening before mars missions start likely 2030s.