With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

Musk is kind of fascinating.

On one hand SpaceX and Starlink are businesses that it's practically embarrassing that seemingly nobody else even tried to build. You look into it and look at Bezos and Blue Origin and wonder if the markets can actually build new businesses anymore.

Then you set them aside and realize that he basically got away with visa fraud because he was wealthy to begin with and lucked into making tons of money off PayPal and didn't even found Tesla...

...and the lesson I take away isn't that there's anything special about Musk. It's that if you have billions of dollars almost anybody with some kind of preoccupation can build giant businesses related to it.

For example, I totally believe if some random geek obsessed with SeaQuest had been part of the PayPal Mafia they could have figured out a way to make a billion dollar business out of underwater habitats and submarines.

...at least if they were crazed in public enough about it, which seems to have turned into a key part of how Musk works at some point.

Kind of like if you have a lot of money and a few obsessions you now get ahead more by having Tom Cruise couch hopping moments than by being an actual Howard Hughes or Hearst.

Separately we obviously really shouldn't be letting companies with such concentrated ownership be publicly traded with these multi-class shares, but I guess that's where we are now: reinventing feudalism in market trappings.

Don't underestimate the harm of being a hyper-rich asshole with government friends. It arguably outweighs all that even on pragmatic terms.

Also, the article explicitly answers your sarcasm.

> guy who predicted that the internet would be a flop

1. If you actually read the Snopes article, you'll see that his 1998 "prediction" was actually a humorous take on the Information Superhighway hoopla what was going on at the time.

2. Something else he wrote in 1998, in more serious matter, has been widely cited and was very important in the post-GFC world: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1998/06/1998b_b...

3. If you do want to take his "prediction" seriously, he was of course wrong about the social impact of the Internet (which he has himself admitted, IIRC).

4. But if you look at the economic numbers of the productivity Internet, he was actually correct:

* https://archive.ph/DUDEw

* https://archive.ph/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...

There are a few chapters on the growth (and lack thereof) of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...

Its hilarious that the left, the home of the Weathermen, masked Antifa terrorists, assassins cheered by their base, studiously ignoring rape by favored groups, and a list I could continue for paragraphs, so weakly grasps for morality as some kind of new Puritans.

The only morality of the left is that of Big Brother.

Musk must be verboten because of his heresies, not because he shares the libertine tendencies of the left.

Considering that Climate Change is apparently the greatest challenge of our age, please point me to a single person who has done more to move the world economy to a Green economy than Musk?

Musk does indeed have some detestable tendencies, as indeed most of us do, if we will be honest in our private moments. The difference is his are magnified by those vehemently opposed to his willingness to oppose the entrenched political elite and speak the truth as he sees it. If Musk was willing to bend the knee he would be as celebrated as Soros despite his trillion..

Musk doesn't need me or anyone to stick up for him, but we as a society need to be much more honest in these dialogues about what we are truly talking about rather than cloak in vile rhetoric and divisive attacks. As long as we debase the debate with emotional baggage of envy and vitriol rather than goal based reasoning, we deserve the pit of despair we're currently swirling into.

> Now grab let’s say Amazon what did they revolutionize?

Self-report. Never heard of AWS-East-1 before?