Good tune. Yeah, if there was ever an example of how far we could reach and still fail, it'd be Musk for this generation at least. We could literally be talking about a buildup to a Mars colony next year if that bag of assholes put half the effort into spacex and subsidiary tech that he has put into his twitter shitfests.
Rubbish.
I detest
Leon as much as the next ATPN member, but SpaceX is doing fine. In fact, they are now
TBTF for NASA and our national space interests. As
@Brovane explained above, you can't nationalize SpaceX without further enriching Elon, even if you wanted to take his ass out of the equation.
A Mars colony is kind of a pipe dream, but there's nothing wrong with dreaming big and having a very long view. If it eventually works out, I'll already be dead anyway. We can't even get back to the moon next year, but you're suggesting Mars was possible if Elon had tried harder? LOL. He's a snake oil salesman, how does trying harder actually succeed faster?
SpaceX arguably succeeds because Elon focuses a lot of his energy elsewhere and he lets Gwynne Shotwell run the business.
If failing to the tune of a $250B+ paper net worth was as easy as you suggest, everyone would be doing it. He got very lucky but let's not paint his entire CV with his Xitter fuck up. Besides, he got a bunch of his cronies and banks to put up most of the actual money. Presumably some are annoyed at him but he couldn't care less about the billions he's personally lost. He probably thinks it was well worth the "investment" to buy a U.S. presidency.