Elon musk has a history of making improbable-sounding promises (buy a tesla now, by 2018 it will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep, humanoid robots, hyperloops).
The majority of these promises have sounded cool enough to enough people that the stock associated with him (TSLA) has made people literal millionaires just by holding onto the stock, and more and more people have bought in and thus have a financial interest in Musk's ventures being seen in a good light (since TSLA stock does not go up or down based on tesla's performance, it goes up or down based on the vibes of elon musk. It is not a car company stock, it is an elon vibes check).
The thing he's saying now pattern matches to be pretty similar, and so given Musk's goal is to gain money, and he gains money by TSLA and SpaceX stock going up, this makes perfect sense as a thing to say and even make minor motions towards in order to make him richer.
People will support it too since it pattern matches with the thing prior TSLA holders got rich off of, and so people will want to keep the musk vibes high so that their own $tsla holdings go to the moon.
Make sense now?
Also people made fun of tesla that it will never be able to compete with the big carmakers. Now I would rather have some stocks in tesla than holding on to volkswagen.
I find this to be the most obvious game plan here. Makes total sense from financial engineering point of view.
You _might_ get to develop nice tech/IP to enable other space based businesses at the same time. "we sold them on X but delivered Y". So it's a bit of a hail mary, but makes total sense to me if you want to have a large budget for inventing the future.
Once you can demonstrate even a fraction of this capability of operations ... I think you can sell a "space dominance" offering to Pentagon for example and just keep pedaling.
"We are going to build the perfect weapon" does not necessarily entice as large engineer population as "we are going to Star Trek".
Another thing - if Moon is going to be a thing, then _properties on Moon_ are going to be a thing.
In theories of value in post-ai societies scarce assets like land are going to become more valuable. So it's a long term plan that makes sense if you believe Moon will be a realestate market.
It is not just a number, as it is for people who just save a few dollars, for whom it really is just a number until they withdraw money to use it. The billionaire's money is not "money", it is actual working assets, and the abstraction of turning this into a number does a terrible job, the result now misunderstood by many. Assets being companies doing stuff mostly (holding non-control-giving paper assets is different and not what being a top capitalist is about, only used as an additional tool below the actual goal). Which they fully control (the small investor does not even have any control worth mentioning when they own shares of a public company).
They don't just play with money, they play with real things! And they want to play with ever bigger real things. They don't just want to improve some minor product. They want to control the fate of civilization.
OT:
I hate this money view with a passion, this is what too many people discussing wealth inequality issues get wrong. This is not Scrooge McDuck and his money pile. Money is an abstraction, and it is misused terribly, hiding what is actually going on for too many observers who then go on to discuss "numbers".
That is also why the idea to "just redistribute the money of the rich" is a failure. It isn't money! It is actual real complex organizations. And you can't just make everything into a public company, and also, even when they are, for better or worse owners don't lead like managers. Doing the socialism thing (I grew up in the GDR) where everybody owns a tiny bit of everything just does not work the same.
We will have to look at what those super-rich are actually doing, case by individual case of ownership, not just look at some abstract numbers. Sometimes concentrated control over a lot of assets is a good thing, and other times it is not. Ignoring the objection of "who would control that?", because right now they control themselves so it's never nobody.
How dare he not have accurately predicted when one of the hardest technical problems in history is solved?
Famous investors like to repeat the quote that “when the tide goes out, that’s when we find out who’s wearing no pants.” When Tesla actually weathers its first market downturn is when we find out how much investors interest is maintained When investment dollars are scarce.
What exactly has Elon done that's "impossible"? Like the Boring Company where he promised 1,000x faster boring? It turned into a mile or two of a poorly routed hole with some Teslas tossed down into it. He and his shills hand waved away the problem, confident their brilliance would allow them to dig 1,000x faster than modern commercial boring. It never happened.
The only impossible thing Elon has done is make fantasy claims and real people fall for it.
Pretty much everything else though is just vapourware.
It was impossible in the sense that nobody else did it before. It was not impossible as in you need to violate basic laws of Physics or elementary Economics.
Before reusable rockets, the idea made sense. Building a rocket is expensive; if we reuse we don’t have to keep spending that money. Fundamentally, rockets are rockets. It’s not like they invented anti-gravity or anything.
It’s like climbing the Everest. Before it was done, it was still something people could plan and prepare for. But you’re not going to climb all the way to the moon, even with oxygen bottles. It’s a completely different problem to solve.
The most difficult point to argue against for people who want to defend Musk’s delusions is simple economics: at the end of the day, when you’ve solved
- the energy source problem (difficult but probably doable);
- the radiation-resistant chips issue (we know we can do it, but the resulting chip is not going be anywhere near as fast as normal GPUs on Earth);
- the head dissipation problem (physically implausible, to be charitable, with current GPUs, but considering that a space-GPU would have a fraction of the power, it would just be very difficult);
- the satellite-to-satellite communication issue, because you cannot put the equivalent of a rack on a satellite, so you’d need communication to be more useful than a couple of GeForces (sure, lasers, but then that’s additional moving parts, it’s probably doable but still a bit of work);
- the logistics to send 1 million satellites (LOL is all I can say, that’s a fair number of orders of magnitude larger than what we can do, and a hell of a lot of energy to do it);
- and all the other tiny details, such as materials and logistics just to build the thing.
Then, you still end up with something which is orders of magnitude worse and orders of magnitude more expensive than what we can already do today on Earth. There is no upside.