Depends. I imagine the opportunity cost of alcohol and cannabis outweigh their benefits from lost productivity. So likely those industries merely give an illusion of positive economics

The economic windows are less broken when people smoke themselves stupid than they are when we send state violence after those people. This goes for most "bad" things. (State) violence is just that destructive to productivity. See also: prohibition.

Inertia I imagine. Planning cycles can be 10, 20 years, perhaps longer for big infrastructure projects.

Or get everyone a nice camping backpack. Still less than the iPad and duel purpose!

Hopefully it’s not cloudy

Which is how Elon gets away with fleecing the retails. Someone with 100k in VTI is giving $100 to Elon at a p/e of 1000.

You have to hand it to him, he’s the best grifter we’ve seen in years.

We don’t even know if humans can survive effectively in Mar’s gravity. This effort is still deep in science fiction land.

Yeah.. they aren’t going to provide internet to the world faster than fiber. There are a few use-cases that make sense. Almost everyone who has money already has faster internet than LEO internet can provide.

And yet, who will use it? You need something to put on the rocket. Seems the vast majority of stuff they’re putting on rockets is their own assets.

What is groks market share? 1%?

Fraud, arguably, since it seems a deliberate attempt to mislead investors

Will he get bailed out by the Feds again though? SpaceX launch 3 failure was bailed out by the DOD. Tesla was bailed out by Obama.

Possibly. I don’t know if being bailed out is a sign of business acumen. Maybe political acumen? In any case bailing out present day Tesla or SpaceX will be very expensive, unclear of taxpayers will go for it.

Which is presumably why Elon is aiming for retail as the bail-outers

SpaceX is emphatically not in need of a bailout. I don't know the history of launch 3, so I can't opine, but saying Tesla was bailed out by Obama is reductive in the extreme. Elon is the single largest taxpayer in US history.

It's not a bail-out Elon wants, nor is it 'safety' for SX. He wants capital to go build out space as fast as possible; he needs retail capital to do it.

People mix up (deliberately, I'm pretty sure) bailouts with payments for services.

The other commenter might be referring to the NASA CRS contract for Falcon 9 and Dragon which was awarded after that third failed launch and pretty much saved the company. But that was payment for providing resupply to the ISS, just like they've done with other companies, not a bailout.

Tesla did get a DoE loan in 2010 at a critical point its early history. It's worth noting that the amount of this loan was approximately 5% what the government spent bailing out legacy automakers in 2008, and about 0.5% of Musk's current net worth.

We’re all feeling it. Unfortunately our country is run by a dude with dementia and a carnival of Fox News hosts.

But I suspect that’ll u-turn hard when the economy implodes