Re:The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
by avmich on Monday May 09, 2022 @04:27PM
(#31319276)
Yes, and here the author also makes mistakes. Founding Tesla is irrelevant; results of Tesla are. Saying that reusable space launchers existed before SpaceX is like saying there were people in America before Columbus - technically true, but Columbus achievement is colossal, similarly the achievements of SpaceX. But we're comparing billionaires and governments :) - will you say Space Shuttle, or Buran, are comparable to Falcon 9? Author didn't provide any arguments for Mars colony's plan :) so let's not get there.
As I said, the article is very questionable - and not because billionaires couldn't use some healthy attention, just because too many statements in the article are doubtful.
Stross anticipated this too:
> Granting individuals enormous leverage can sometimes be socially useful. But before you point at Musk and Tesla or SpaceX, I need to remind you that he didn't found Tesla, he merely bought into it then took over: SpaceX's focus on reusability is good, but we had reusable space launchers before—the only really new angle is that it's a cost-reduction measure. Starlink isn't an original, it's merely a modern, bigger, faster version of 1990's Teledesic (which fell victim to over-ambitious technology goals and the dot-com bust). Meanwhile, billionaires can do immense damage: the Koch network has largely bankrolled climate change denial, Musk's Mars colony plan is fatally flawed, and so on.
You say "better" results than the government... but it's not obvious that a government can't make these marginal improvements... you just assert that "these words are basically wrong".