aikinai

A lot of people are forgetting that. You see many anti-capitalist types claiming the world was paradise before we created technology and civilization. They have zero perspective and can't appreciate everything the modern world does for us.

That's actually what I thought this article would be about when I first read the title!

How is Scott Bessent like a racist grandpa?

Private capital. This is a VC website, and you just naïvely and incorrectly assume startups are government funded?

Even if the government had funded it, it would have been a good idea with extremely positive ROI. But no, they didn’t; you just made that up.

It started in the early 2000s. Politics hadn't shifted left enough to make him right-wing back then.

This is exactly how people on here claim SpaceX is dependent on government handouts.

Without a shift to electric cars and the emergence of reusable, affordable space travel?

Companies aren't funded by one person, even his. After their current round, Blue Origin will have raised more than three times as much capital as SpaceX, and SpaceX is obviously far more advanced and has already gone public.

Rivian used ten times more capital to reach their first delivery and twenty times more before their IPO as compared to Tesla.

It looks like it's not Musk's money making his companies successful.

That's a somewhat valid point about the "move fast and break things" culture at SpaceX. I'm sure there's some correlation between the pioneering, hyper-productive culture at Elon's companies and safety violations, but there's no way you could claim that lax safety standards account for the massive gap between SpaceX and the rest of the entire industry. It's not like they're just pumping widgets out of a factory faster and cheaper. They've revolutionized the cutting edge across all aspects, including design, software, etc. If the best companies could be explained by cutting safety corners, then China would be leading America in everything.

And that was the first I'd heard about high fatality rates for Tesla, so I looked it up. The cars themselves are always rated as very safe, and it seems the reason for high fatalities is just who buys them. Apparently, it's young, affluent, more risk-tolerant people who frequently drive fast on highways.

Ben Thompson calls these strategy credits.

Weird how other people can put up more money and not be able to make the same things as Musk’s companies.

None of those books are banned.

That doesn't change anything the parent said. If not copying Apple created a better product that people want to buy, someone would be doing it.

Oh… not what I expected this to be about.

You can also do that in high-functioning societies. In Japan people leave their purses, phones, etc to hold their seat before ordering in a café, going to the bathroom, etc.