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.
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.