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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

Then there's Elon Musk...who is apparently thinking about a new company to sell bricks made from the mud from his tunnel boring company.

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I feel as if attempting to start a side business in an unrelated field could be considered as a hobby.

Precisely, even at the micro level. Coding a video platform is different than coding an analytics system. 90% of coding is research and lots of that is done without as another commenter said money+deadline, ie. not a contract. Musk surely has lots of hobbies and Hammock Driven Development happens (Rich Hickey/Clojure style). If Musk ever starts getting chubby then I’ll worry—elsewhere in thread I qualify this.

My hobby remained my hobby even when it started making money. It wasn't until I started focusing on profit where it ceased to be a hobby and started feeling like work.

Elon Musk doesn't appear to be motivated by profit and therefore he doesn't need a hobby. Besides, what cooler hobby could there be than building rockets.

If he isn’t motivated by profit, why did he recently seek a $2.4 billion dollar raise?

So he can pay to develop the platform needed so he can retire on Mars

He’s a smart guy, he knows that the whole Mars thing is just PR for people who want to believe. Musk is a marketing genius, but when you strip away the money he’s in it for money and power.

I think of it as axiomatic that nobody is really in it for the money, as that is just a placeholder for the ability to do things or comparative status.

When you say he's in it for power, that sounds like you think of power as meaning power over other people, but why can't he be primarily motivated by seeking power over nature - which living on Mars might amount to the ultimate example of?

That is classical diversification: commoditizing a most-likely discarded waste product. Pretty innovative if you ask me.

How can something be both innovative and classic?

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