Damage control at SpaceX https://www.theinformation.com/articles/elon-musks-no-2-at-s...

Damage control at Tesla https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-giga...

Twitter finally distracting him away from his meddling https://www.yahoo.com/news/spacex-employees-relieved-elon-mu...

> Uhh... we tried that. it'd called NASA, and it's been behind the soviet union since the early 2000's.

Fascinating. You know what, actually, this part of the conversation is far more interesting to me. I concede that Musk is a super genius that definitely didn't do a Nazi salute on live television. I'd rather explore this with you.

So, you said it right there... NASA, which functioned as a government sponsored project manager distributing out contracts to businesses from a government budget... Failed to keep up with the Soviet Union space program, which was, well you know the answer! Fully nationalized.

I'm not surprised that American half measures at nationalization fail, just like I'm not surprised that the HSR failed through crony capitalism. There in the name. I'm arguing for something a little more dramatic than NASA. Something provably effective. Speaking of HSR, I'm reminded of another modern nationalized infrastructure project that is unparalleled in scale or success, somewhere in the East ;)

> Why do you feel the right to be able to take what someone else has built?

Musk's money has value only because of the society we all together create. It's silly to draw some lines around and say "actually the country's national space program should move to the whims of this one guy that signed investment paperwork and occasionally yells at people on a factory floor." A deeply unserious way of managing something critical to national sovereignty. The Soviets understood this which is why they got to space first. The Americans could only come close when they got a little commie about it; they surpassed the Soviets only when they centralized even more than the Soviets did, which is why Ayn Rand got upset enough to write about it: https://courses.aynrand.org/works/apollo-11/