I think it's just more that Carmack didn't want to go all in with his entire life and net worth the way Elon did (and without which SpaceX would certainly have died exactly the same death). And who can blame him?

Musk went all in with Tesla, too. At one point he was down to about $200,000 and was a few hours from bankruptcy of Tesla and himself.

Musk is an enormous risk taker.

Would you mind providing a source?

"The deal ended up closing on Christmas Eve, hours before Tesla would have gone bankrupt. Musk had just a few hundred thousand dollars left and could not have made payroll the next day."

"Elon Musk" by Ashlee Vance, pg 210

It was a month, not a few hours, and I have no idea where you got the $200,000 number. That is certainly not what Elon himself said. He said 1 month.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1323640901248393217

The reason you have no idea is you're talking about different instances of near bankruptcy for Tesla. Which tends to support GP's point.

What other instances? That was the really obvious one during model 3 “production hell” as they scaled up production mostly on hopium assuming they’d sell.

2008 https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/elon-musk...

It’s easy to take risks if the failure condition is “still a multimillionaire”.

I refuse to think any sufficiently clever billionaire doesn’t have $1-10M in gold buried in a couple geographically distributed places. I know several people with NW of <$50M who have stashed 2-4% of their assets away in this fashion.

World wars happen, governments collapse, favor shifts, etc. Why wouldn’t you have a backup plan when it’s just pennies?

I refuse to believe that he was ever at risk of having less than 5-10M in pocket money left over after everything implodes.

Why bother when you can just have real estate instead?

I'm likely missing something here, but to me this minimises the problem to just a reduction in the number of properties you can move into (assuming some are lost and some of the others sold).

Title to real estate, as well as its ability to be liquidated, rests wholly in the cooperation of the state, as well as their recognition of your legitimate title to same. I’m reminded of the end of Godfather 2.

10-20kg of gold coins buried at gps coordinates in the deep desert has no such limitations.

I think a lot of ultrawealthy who have experience playing the geopolitical game probably must have some hedges like this. Doesn’t Thiel have NZ citizenship without any explicit intention of residing there?

It’s not like value stored like this loses its utility even if the state doesn’t collapse/confiscate your assets/persecute you.

I can’t imagine circumstances where one would end up being a billionaire then ever being a not-millionaire unless you’re thick as a brick.

> I refuse to think

Ok :-)

> I refuse to think any sufficiently clever billionaire doesn’t have $1-10M in gold buried in a couple geographically distributed places.

Maybe you don't remember this, but Elon wasn't a Billionaire with his exit from Paypal. He made his bones with Tesla/SpaceX (honestly, mostly Tesla, but we'll see how SpaceX turns out, it could be bigger in the end).

I’m not a billionaire (technically neither was Elon at the time but that’s besides the point, but I suspect human psychology leads to a non-linear relationship between net work and acceptance of risk. Most billionaires don’t want to become mere millionaires. And people in poverty would likely say it’s easy for someone in the middle class to take risks.

It's probably no coincidence that Bill Gates was also. Bet the farm 2-3x at least.