Elon’s SpaceX Profit Motive
It‘s been a few weeks since SpaceX went public with a boom and then contracted significantly, but I remain extremely bullish on SpaceX in general and on Elon in particular. The news that he is eligible for 1 billion SpaceX shares when the human population on Mars reaches 1 million represents an incredible alignment of profit motive and company mission. It’s exactly why he started SpaceX in the first place. But even more, Elon is someone I trust to execute on a mission like that regardless of profit motive. He has shown many times his willingness to set fire to millions of dollars for the good of his companies, and his companies tend to have humanity’s largest challenges in their sights. (I won’t say anything about his horrible politics or pathetic sycophantic behavior toward Trump, both of which demonstrated the risks of empowering idiot-savants.)
By now everyone who wants to know has heard about how Elon used all of his PayPal profits to start SpaceX and Tesla, went bankrupt funding Falcon test flights, and worked maniacally to help Tesla make its numbers (the way a conductor works maniacally, but not the musician). It’s a bit of a trope but similarly clear to anyone who cares that while Elon needs money to operate he doesn’t do very much to pursue personal wealth. This trait, ironically, stands in direct opposition to Trump. There are two threads I want to pull a little more to flesh out why I’m bullish on SpaceX.
A lot of what Elon has done with respect to SpaceX could be construed as post hoc justification or rationalization; a decision is made for some unrelated reason but gets justified after the fact with a moral rationale. The current dialogue I’ve heard from Elon about SpaceX’s mission is to make humanity multi-planetary so that consciousness has a better chance of survival. That’s an admirable goal, and it might even be the true goal, but it could just as easily be post hoc rationalization for someone who likes Mars and rockets.
But what is incontrovertible is SpaceX is poised to be the only way to move beyond Earth, either into orbit or to Mars (all other companies and countries are rounding errors right now). It’s a bit like the combined positions of Spain and Portugal in the 1400s. The earth today is Europe, and space/Mars is the new world. If you want to do something off-planet, you have to go through SpaceX. This is an unbelievably strong monopoly, like the East India Company. That is reason enough for SpaceX to succeed (to say nothing of their rocket approach and telecommunications prospects).
The other point I want to expand on is a conversation I read about between Musk and Bill Gates in the Walter Isaacson book. In brief, Bill Gates shorts Tesla while trying to fundraise for climate change causes, and this rightfully infuriates Musk (and should infuriate others). How can you be climate-conscious while shorting the company that is doing the most to mitigate carbon emissions? Of course, Musk has a financial motivation to attack Gates, but the point stands on its own: while some will divorce money from moral alignment, Musk does not. (He certainly divorced politics from moral alignment, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.)