Eric Schmidt has applied to become a citizen of Cyprus

Elon Musk is funding a space program to put people on Mars via SpaceX. NASA has not improved rocket technology since the 1970's and SpaceX is on track to have a fully reusable rocket the size of the Saturn IV in the next few years and people to Mars not long after.

why a Cypriot passport he can live in France or Germany or Italy or any other EU state. But Cyprus provides passports quickly. Malta and Portugal are also quite good in this regard.

Except NASA funded and helped create SpaceX.

Here are some of their contributions,

> The injector at the heart of Merlin is of the pintle type that was first used in the Apollo Lunar Module landing engine (LMDE).

> To meet that need, in 1994, just as Fastrac was getting underway, Majumdar began developing the Generalized Fluid System Simulation Program, or GFSSP, which was first used by the Agency’s analysts in October 1996. NASA employees used the software for the Fastrac turbopump, and even though the program was cancelled in the early 2000s, the turbopump became the predecessor for others like it, such as SpaceX’s Merlin rocket engines, which power the company’s Falcon 9 commercial launch vehicle.

> The basic principles of the Fastrac design (namely, a pintle injector and ablatively cooled chamber) lived on in SpaceX's Merlin 1A engine, which used a turbopump from the same subcontractor.[18] The Merlin-1A was somewhat larger with a thrust of 77,000 lbf (340 kN) versus 60,000 lbf (270 kN) for Fastrac. The same basic design was capable of much higher thrust levels after upgrading the turbopump. Variants of the Merlin-1D achieve 190,000 lbf (850 kN) of thrust as of May, 2018,[19] though the combustion chamber is now regeneratively cooled.[20]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastrac_(rocket_engine)

> Hackler: Did NASA share any technological types of lessons learned that influenced your vehicle?

> Giger: Yes, Mike Horkachuck and Warren Ruemmele were very good about looking at our system, seeing how it was similar or dissimilar to Shuttle, Apollo, Mercury, Gemini, any other program in history, and trying to share those lessons learned. For example, parachutes. We were able to get a lot of data from the Apollo Program, from the Orion Program even, and leverage lessons learned from them on that.

> A lot of joint technologies, too. We learned about PICA, Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator tiles that we use on our heat shield, which was originally developed in conjunction with NASA. We learned a lot from how they did that, and they helped us bring that technology in house, which was great. Now we build our own variant of that in-house. There were numerous kinds of examples of that, where they shared technology or lessons learned that we then either incorporated in the design, or took that technology to the next level here, which was great.

Much of the materials technology, engine design, engineering simulations etc. at SpaceX were derived from NASA expertise and knowledge. Furthermore, this was all done largely on NASA's dime. NASA gave SpaceX an extremely favourable deal and is its single largest investor.

> Fourth, we took no equity. The reason the decision was to take no equity was that in the world of venture capital, sometimes you make poor investment decisions and you get no money back. Sometimes you make really good investment decisions, and you get five times your money back or ten times your money back. But you almost never get one time your money back.

> I knew enough about the federal government to know that if you invested money and you got none of your money back, everybody would get angry. But it also turns out that if you invest money and you get five times your money back, everybody gets angry too, because then you’re competing with the private sector. There’s no way that when you’re doing innovation like this you could expect that you were going to get one times your money back. That’s just silly. It was better to take no equity at all.

This is from the oral histories, https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/hist...

So NASA gives them access to technological expertise + historical engineering data + designs + prior NASA IP, gives them cash for development, takes no equity, let's SpaceX retain IP, and provides a guaranteed market.

SpaceX is doing incredible work and they're bringing these technologies to the market. They're making the sexy iPhone from the unsexy fundamental science done by NASA for them, and this development is being mostly funded by the tax payer, with nominal (up to 30% to 50%) private contribution.

I would hold them up as a model for how to blend the best elements of public works & private enterprise, and a model on how to do public-private partnerships.

> Getting a bank in most other countries is not hard at all and certainly not a "nightmare."

I don't know about "most" countries, but my American colleagues in Germany and Switzerland complained about the difficulty of doing anything related to finance (banks, brokers, taxes) because of their extra tax liability. I personally had to sign quite a few forms certifying that I am not a US citizen or a greencard holder or in any other way tax liable in the US, so it does seem to be a big deal.

> The Venn diagram of banks where you’d feel safe storing millions of dollars and that would also be willing to help you defraud the US Treasury are exceedingly small. It’s just not practical.

You only need 1. However, the solution isn’t to move money from your account to a bank which then hides what’s going in from the US government. The solution is to make a terrible investment say buying land from Bob for 10 million only to sell it to Sally for 5 million. Meanwhile an associate of Bob, Sally, or both moves 4 million to a holding company owned by you.

That gets 4 million in a secret account, let’s you offset capital 5 million in capital gains, and pays 1 million for money laundering.

Repeat as needed. Sure, 4 million in a hidden account is less useful day to day, but it’s insurance if you need to flee the country or happened to go bankrupt etc.