If you don’t care for Elon what more could you ask for than he wastes tens of billions on such a fruitless endeavor? Do you think he’ll just keep launching satellites for fun and pleasure?

> If you don’t care for Elon what more could you ask for than he wastes tens of billions on such a fruitless endeavor?

Just because I don't care for Elon (nor think he should have that much money), doesn't mean I don't care what he does with his money. If he buys and shreds the Mona Lisa, I care. If he pollutes LEO because a math error keeps the satellites from deorbiting and causes Kessler Syndrome, I care. If his Boring Company in Vegas has a disaster and a hundred people die in his tunnel, I care.

I care about a lot of other things he could do too, but I'm not going to list them.

Meanwhile, while I don't care for him, that doesn't mean I want him to become poor. I don't care if he has a megayacht or something.

Starlink is too low to cause Kessler Syndrome. The orbits all decay within a few years naturally.

It could cascade for five years or so. That's a long time.

Well, he launched a car out of spite, so, why not?

They had a rocket they needed to test (Falcon Heavy) and that requires a test payload. Usually test payloads are boring mass analogs. Instead they decided to use something different and get a bunch of marketing out of it. Everything had to be approved by the appropriate government agencies well ahead of time. So where does the "spite" come from?

I can't find the reference now, so perhaps I hallucinated it. But as I recall, the car was intended to go to another investor, and the early-Tesla investor/CEO shenanigans put it into limbo, and so Musk launched it.

Interesting story if true. Why would Elons personal roadster have been promised to an investor?

The alternative was literally a lump of concrete.

That was the Falcon Heavy test launch and he wasn’t able to even give away the flight for free to anyone when he offered.

It only happened once, which was an obvious marketing stunt that presumably served its purpose. There's not much benefit to doing it over and over again.

If he was really doing it "for the lulz" then there would be many more such launches. Cars, a painting of some artist that offended him, etc. We haven't seen that though.

Quite a lot of his wealth is predicated on this actually succeeding, and is otherwise paper money.

His net worth is in SpaceX and Tesla, namely the companies doing the actual work. It's circular reasoning.