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

Ah, this old fallacy. There are myriad examples of the rich striving to be richer and the powerful fighting to gain even more power. Why would it be any different with Musk? If anything I suspect (this is absolutely an unverifiable opinion; I am not stating it as fact) that Musk's driving force is to become the first trillionaire.

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tyg13 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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kadoban 6 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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Billionaire 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, 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.

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z3t4 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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sixQuarks 3 hours 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

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turtlesdown11 2 hours 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.

	▲	stevage an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I will definitely credit Elon with building a company that made reusable self-landing rockets seem routine and boring. That was definitely "impossible". Pretty much everything else though is just vapourware.