> Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!

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?

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adastra22 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The story here is even simpler. SpaceX is going public this year. Elon made a monumentally shitty investment in Twitter and then poured a stupid amount of money into xAI at the peak of the cycle. By having SpaceX buy xAI, he gets to swap worthless shares in that company for more SpaceX liquidity. Simple as that.

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mmustapic 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly, and there needs to be some economic justification for a giant rocket. There is no money to be made by going to Mars, and AI data centers in space could attract investors (who are just riding the data center hype).

	▲	fsloth 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I data centers in space could attract investors (who are just riding the data center hype). 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.

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rockemsockem 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Really seems silly to think that the guy with $800 billion is spending most of his time maximizing his money.

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tyg13 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Doesn't it just make sense though? How else would he have gotten 800 billion dollars?

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kadoban 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Welcome to billionares. If they weren't obsessed with "number go up" over any other consideration, they wouldn't be billionares.

	▲	nosianu 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Gib money is not like money for the normal person. It is a placeholder for how much influence you have on the economy - and even the state. 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. Companies doing stuff mostly. 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.

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z3t4 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He probably have 700 billion in loans and need to pay rent

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sixQuarks an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

What’s silly is a bunch of so-called intelligent entrepreneurs and tech insiders twisting themselves into a pretzel coming up with reasons why this or that won’t work, by the guy who keeps doing the impossible

	▲	turtlesdown11 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> by the guy who keeps doing the impossible 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.

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randomNumber7 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, but landing a rocket backwards also sounded very improbable to me, yet it looks pretty cool 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.

	▲	thephyber 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I wouldn’t be so sure about Tesla stock. Tesla has only weathered 1 market downturn cycle and that was when it was a very different company. The company has thus far had access to plentiful capital since the Model S started being delivered. 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.

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sixQuarks an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh no! He promised my car would be self driving in 2018 but it took until 2026 before that was true.

How dare he not have accurately predicted when one of the hardest technical problems in history is solved?