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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

I have trouble reconciling Musk's stated goals and his current decisions, his daily status as a billionaire. Someone who truly believes in the dream should be shovelling all of their cash into that dream. At this point he should be selling his home to personally finance the first launches aimed at Mars. So either he doesn't really believe, or he is on a conveniently circuitous route that requires him to first gather untold riches to himself. By now I would expect him to at least setup a substantial trust (17B?) payable only to Mars exploration efforts.

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There was a point after founding SpaceX and Tesla when Musk put all of his money into the companies; he had to borrow money from friends to make rent. This was just after SpaceX had blown up its third rocket, with no money left for another try, while Tesla was losing money hand over fist because the roadster was selling at a loss.

You can criticize Musk for many things, but he really does believe that his goals are achievable, that he will achieve them, and that they are good investments.

>>> ...and that they are good investments.

The really important dreams are rarely good investments. I don't think anyone seriously believes the manned exploration of Mars will turn any profit. A true believer wouldn't care. There are people who would hand over a dozen winning lotto tickets for a chance to go to Mars. Musk faces that decision every day. That makes it difficult for me to believe tales of his madman/dreamer rhetoric.

And I'm not criticizing musk the person. I'm say that here is a disconnect between the public dreamer persona and the known actions of the physical person.

Having a dream is not the same as beeing an idiot. For a Mars mission to have any change you need to improve on rocket technology, you need a strong space industry.

You can not put all your money into one mission and crash into mars. Its a multiyear effort of building a sustainable the needed infrastucture and technology.

Because of this approche Elon is different from others and its why he actually have a change of success.

>>> .. I don't think anyone seriously believes the manned exploration of Mars will turn any profit.

I think this will be the most profitable enterprise mankind has ever seen. A earth full of mineral wealth untouched, available for whoever can lay their hands on. If spaceX was trading today I would buy its stock in a blink and hold on to it for the next 50 years.

Mining on earth is basically free compared to what it would cost to mine on other planets.

In fact, I'd be intrigued if you could name many other people who've made such a massive fortune and then risked bankruptcy over such ambitious ideas?

The Gates and Zuckerbergs of this world are prepared to part their amassed fortunes, but only when they have no possible use for it (IE death)

That's my point. Billionaires don't get to where they are by chasing outlandish dreams. There are people that sacrifice everything for a dream. They are usually the first people to climb a mountain or break an Olympic record. Or they join the church and serve the poor of india. Whatever money they have is dedicated immediately because money is always secondary.

Yes, but to be the first person to climb a mountain takes tens of thousands of dollars of gear, extensive research, and lots of experience.

Smart dreamers don't exit high school with that dream, make a hundred bucks at the drive-thru, and buy some rope and a few carabiners at the hardware store, see how high they can get that weekend, and repeat for decades. They re-invest their $100 until they can buy or commission the gear they need, gather experience on other mountains, and spend time learning about their target until they can make the climb.

Lol, take a look at climbers. The people doing new stuff are all nuts. Look at the guys who just died in Antarctica. Doing something new in the requires money. Just try launching an Antarctic expedition with less than a million. They spend family money, they spend student loans, they engage in borderline charity fraud. They leave wives and children at home, sometimes forever, just to put their names in a record book. Smart=careful, and careful people are rarely the first to do anything.

You might want to read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Nyad#Cuba_to_Florida_swi...

Yes, you still need money to attempt something big. But that's really a small blocker given what it would actually take in terms of human effort to do some thing of that magnitude.

As a regular lap swimmer, I have strong opinions on her stunts. Note the direction of travel, never north-to-south. She did swim a long way, but the current was a huge part of her speed. There is a fine line between swimming A->B and drifting. I am much more impressed by this guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Strel

>>Yes, but to be the first person to climb a mountain takes tens of thousands of dollars of gear, extensive research, and lots of experience.

The right way to look at this is to see, if you would climb the mountain tomorrow if you had all that. The answer is obviously for most people 'no'. The real reason why most people do no climb a mountain is because it hard.

>>They re-invest their $100 until they can buy or commission the gear they need, gather experience on other mountains, and spend time learning about their target until they can make the climb.

Very true, plus they keep climbing a lot of smaller mountains.

I don't see what you are getting at. An enterprise such as sending people to Mars is obviously not going to be made by selling a house or a one time boost from a personal fortune, but by setting up a system that allows consistent and substantial profits.

Also, Musk's fortune is comes from the shares he owns of his own companies. Not sure it's a smart move to sell all those shares to invest the cash back in the same company.

He has 10+ billion to spend. He could very easily fund probes to Mars, lots of them, to study the methods of landing/exploration needed for future manned missions. Those first steps could happen today, on his rockets.

Perhaps he believes getting to Mars will cost a trillion, and is waiting to attain that? Given his track record I'm far more inclined to trust the guy's roadmap for attaining his personal goals than yours or mine.

That would be the conveniently circuitous route I mentioned. But if the plan was to gather all the money to himself first, then I would expect him to be living a more austere lifestyle to more quickly amass funds.

He does not just want to go to mars. He wants to live on mars, to make it habitable and wasting all his money on sending probes to mars today will be a useless waste of money and he will be bankrupt before achieving anything A shuttle to mars with enough for a people to go and live today would cost hundreds of billions which be doesn't have so be is doing the next best thing bring down the price to millions so that he can go.

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