What I did find is that Mike Griffin, the aerospace engineer who became the top NASA administrator in 2005, had a previous job as president of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s in-house venture-capital fund for national security tech.
He invested $500 million in commercial space, eventually $396 million eventually going to SpaceX, along with $454 million of outside capital and $100 million of Musk's own money in 2006. [0]
So, if there is in In-Q-Tel investment, it is logged behind the Crunchbase paywall. That said, In-Q-Tel is an excellent idea to produce better home-grown security technology, and I have no problem with it (not even with their publicized investment in Facebook, and I consider FB a plague on humanity — that's more of a slur on In-Q-Tel than In-Q-Tel is on FB).
[0] https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-to-...
If Twitter is the game, Musk is the whale with so much money that he bought the company. He spent $44 billion trying to win the game. And the wild thing to me is that he's still failing at it. Things like "let that sink in" [1] and re-labeling the building "Titter" [2] are just not very good jokes. For a mere one billion dollars, he could have hired every good comedy writer in the world. Instead he has lost at least $24 billion while generating enormous amounts of reputation-puncturing press and very plausibly putting a famously hard-to-wreck company on the path to irrelevancy. If it's not the most spectacular own-goal in business history, I'd certainly like to hear about the worse ones.
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/let-t...
[2] https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-twitter-headquarters-sign-pain...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/26/23657182/elon-musk-twitte...
You may not owe $billionaire or $celebrity better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
2. If by "easy loans" you mean competing for contracts with the likes of BlueOrigin, Raytheon and Boeing, you ought to drop the word 'easy'
3. If the goal is getting back at the industry, one questions whether Elon Musk wouldn't have had an easier time just buying up a bunch of the papers like Bezos and Murdoch
4. Unlike the previous Twitter regime, Musk allows organisations free reign to critique anyone and anything they like. They just have to disclose who's paying for the criticism is all :)
That's why you were not allowed to like or retweet posts that linked to substack, right?
2) No, this is not what I meant. I meant easy loan terms, otherwise they would have just gone after less competitive loans in the open market.
3) Ask Elon? He gets to kill multiple birds with one Twitter purchase. Something Bezos can't do.
4) There's a distinction between "paying for something" and "paying someone who does something", and that distinction is editorial control. Ask artists and writers who sell works for hire by specification. And tell it to those who have had their accounts locked, even under Musk's ownership.
It's so tiring having to rehash this in every conversation about Twitter, so… please, let's just acknowledge that Elon doesn't care about free speech and move on with our lives.
This has to be it. Elon is petty and vindictive. Looking at stories NOR has written about him it would seem the sort of thing that would fire up his sensitivities.
(Source: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/donor-demogra...)
> NPR is an ally of the preferred political party of the rich.
In order to infer the second statement from the first, first you have to demonstrate that >50% of political donors (not donations) of greater than $100,000 were from Democrats. Perhaps Democract-leaning donors were merely motivated to make a bunch of donations over $100k, while Republican-leaning donors made fewer donations per donor.
It would be even better if you demonstrated that >50% of political donors above a certain wealth threshold gave to Democrats over Republicans
The really interesting thing in that website is that big spenders favor PACs over either party.
And Democrats win out with donations over Republicans in all monetary categories, not just the $100k+.
My first thought. How much in easy loans have his companies received from the government?
This is just rich people hating on the industry that publicly critiques them.