RE: Elon Musk, Social Media Rage, & The Death of Nuance

Yeah, pretty much agree. One of the things I've been saying for a couple years now is, "Don't bet against Elon. But understand he's not necessarily your friend". It's not so much that I think he's a villain (though I won't discount that possibility), but he's a very wealthy & powerful person with strong interests that might conflict with some of my own.

So in other words he's got his own goals, and they may not necessarily be our goals. For example, he marketed his purchase of Twitter as "freedom for social media users", and to be fair some improvements along those lines did happen. But certainly it stopped short of what many expected. IMHO his primary goal was taking advantage of the platform's infrastructure & massive user base to train his AI models and eventually turn it into a scaled-up US version of WeChat.

I suspect something of an ulterior motive with the SpaceX IPO as well, and how it's being marketed to the investors buying into the SpaceX IPO hype hoping it will make them insanely rich. While I think it will be likely be an excellent very long-term growth play and I will buy a little here and there when the price is reasonable, the IPO price (and especially the current price) has a high narrative premium attached to it that assumes all goals are accomplished without hiccups and on-time (pretty tall order in the space business). Near as I can tell, his priority is building an interplanetary space infrastructure and capability, and he's not above taking advantage of "dumb money" investors (who will both buy and sell their shares at the worst times) to fund that goal.

That being said, I do hope he's successful in pulling it off. This seems a lot like the buildout of the transcontinental railroad, and if successful it will enable a lot of opportunities for many, many people. And if I were forced to invest or loan my money to either SpaceX or the US government, at least I know an investment with SpaceX has a non-zero chance of actually turning a profit. 😉