Why Does Elon Musk Still Have a Security Clearance? The U.S. government seems to think he’s too big to fail.
Why Does Elon Musk Still Have a Security Clearance? The U.S. government seems to think he’s too big to fail.
The U.S. government seems to think he’s too big to fail.
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I've said for a long time now that the U.S. government needs to stop relying on SpaceX and I've got a ton of pushback. "He's not in charge of the company! He just owns it!" Yeah, well I am guessing he wasn't talking to Putin about electric cars or Twitter.
I mean, he absolutely was talking to Putin about Xitter as well, I'm guessing! This "champion of free speech" has pretty much silenced any opinions about Trump and his companies that he doesn't like. Nice little preview of the world we're careening toward where billionaires get all the money, all the power, and they can even direct the speech of media outlets...
Nice little preview of the world we're careening toward where billionaires get all the money, all the power, and they can even direct the speech of media outlets...
It's already like that. It'll just get a lot worse in the U.S. if Trump wins. There are plenty of countries where this is the norm already unfortunately.
Thats like saying Bezos doesn't run WAPO and didn't kill the endorsement, its a nonsensical notion
I agree, but I heard it many times right here on Lemmy. By people also saying things like "I know Elon is terrible, but..." in the post.
Hard to stop relying on the best rockets in the world. Maybe Blue Origin or RocketLab will step up but it’s hard to see that happening.
Better to just force him to divest than to drop one of the very few good launch providers.
They only are the best rockets in the world because the U.S. government has been giving them piles of money to develop them.
That should not have happened in the first place, but I would like to at least see the government seize their patents since they were paid for by our taxes.
Take the company, keep the good people and make it a part of nasa.
If the US can force a sale with Tiktok then the US can force Elon to sell SpaceX for national security reasons.
That sets a very bad precedent.
Or a very good one. If it's too big to fail, then it's already a problem.
The government forcibly taking ownership of a business is a bad thing.
Just let the business fail.
What if all the funding already comes from the government?
So if your ISP goes under and it's the only option in your area you'd rather be without internet than have a nationalized internet, even if the government is not allowed to snoop your data?
And then it dominos into other things failing.
that precedent already exists.
For example, the Chattanooga and Tennessee Electric Power Company was nationalized into the TVA; As well as the rail roads and financial industries have a revolving door of nationalization-an-de-nationalization.
Everyone has already told you it's not a precedent but I should also note the eminent domain literally only requires the US to pay a fair market price, not for them to not take it.
Can you explain why?
Something something competition something invisible hand?
Just to head that off, SpaceX doesn't have competition at this point. ULA can't match the Falcon rockets, and Boeing has their fingers in that pie. Blue Origin is staring at a corner and appears to be wanking itself. Virgin Galactic is only interested in space tourism. There's a bunch of little companies trying to get past the R&D stage, but nobody substantial. NASA's own rockets are an expensive boondoggle because Congress can't shut up and let them do their job.
SpaceX is it. Nationalizing the company would not only get rid of the company's biggest problem (the meatsack ego at its top), but would also do an end run around Congress treating NASA as a jobs program with pork in every state.
Sigh, we need to fund NASA more.
I caught a NDGT clip talking about how the nasa and space program in general accounted for a fraction of a percent of the us budget.
We need to cut Boeings military contracts and send it to nasa.
Because it opens the doors for the Republicans to start seizing businesses they don't like.
They’ve been giving Boeing lots of money too.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding about how the space program works. NASA pays SpaceX for launch services. For other initiatives, NASA funds research initiatives through multiple companies for redundancy.
If we want to talk about pissing away money for rockets, how much money went to SLS development? Or maybe compare Boeing’s Starliner costs versus Crew Dragon.
Do the research and show me with numbers who the more cost efficient rocket development program is. I’ll wait.
The neat thing about government science programs, or any government program really, is that cost efficiency is not what drives results. If the best way to accomplish a goal is going to cost more money, then it costs more money. Thinking of the government as a business is as helpful as thinking about government budgets like a household budget. Governments maximize outcomes for their citizens, not shareholder value or profits.
And because you ended your post so unnecessarily rudely, so will I: stand up for your fellow man and encourage the de-privatization of space... and stop licking Elon's boots. We'll wait. ✌️
Nah Elon can fuck right off. He’s easily the world’s most colossal asshole.
How would you measure success? I’d measure it by number of objectives completed. Let’s take the commercial crew program as an example - how many successful crew launches has SpaceX completed vs. Boeing? How about vs. NASA? No American launch system compares to SpaceX in safety and capability yet. (Russia and China might be competitors, but there are political reasons why they can’t be chosen.)
I would absolutely LOVE to see more competition that obsoletes SpaceX. Maybe Blue Origin or RocketLab will step up? I don’t think SLS is really viable though.
I’d measure it by number of objectives completed.
How many commercial space flight programs landed on the moon? SpaceX was founded in 2002, over two decades ago. It had decades of public engineering data and knowledge to build on. In 1957, Sputnik made it to space, the first artificial satellite in the history of Earth. In 1969, humans landed on the moon.
I think the goals and scale of these efforts aren’t comparable. Best to compare apples to apples.
You're right, the goal of getting to the moon and scale of the effort was much bigger than putting satellites into space, even if they've put a lot of satellites into space. They had to invent crewed rockets. Nobody knew how to take an explosion and put a human person on top of it and surf that up to space, then people figured out how. Without that work, SpaceX (and friends) would not exist now.
NASA pays SpaceX for launch services.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html
I think you're confusing NASA as a client of SpaceX with direct government subsidies and contacts. SpaceX has received billions and billions of dollars via contracts since 2015 (date of the article I linked). They've used that government money for their R&D to advance their tech and get to where they are today.
Yes, I mentioned that they also receive R&D contracts, along with the other major players like Boeing. The difference is that historically they have received less money yet delivered more.
I'm not sure what part you think I'm not understanding since I didn't suggest the opposite of anything you said.
Fair enough, other than the idea that they shouldn’t have been paid for the services rendered. R&D is a service just as much as launch is.
I do agree that anything developed using public funds should be publicly owned. Good luck convincing the US government of that though… that would upset the corporate overlords.
SpaceX has been paid extensively for services not rendered. The funds that are currently paying for their Starship development were ostensibly for a lunar lander. And they're years behind schedule at this point. They haven't even started on the lander itself.
That’s certainly true, though arguably Starship development is a prerequisite to the lunar lander, otherwise it could never leave the ground.
It’s really hard to understand why NASA picked Starship over a smaller, more traditional lander.
The Americans should probably nationalise SpaceX, or at least buy out a controlling percentage of the shares.
The US should honestly just nationalize SpaceX and merge it into NASA. Add its operating costs into NASA's budget, cut some redundancies, and I'm sure we'd see a lot of progress happen pretty quickly.
I'd rather see it run like the USPS. Let it be a quasi-independent company owned by the government. Even though Congress fucks with the USPS, they don't fuck with it like they do NASA.
Nationalizing SpaceX would probably be financially disasteous (seeing as how Musk has to keep pulling money from his businesses to fund twitter, and to buy out Gwynne Shotwell, who was approached by Boeing to be their new CEO in late 2022)
Most people assume Musk's businesses are all on incredibly shaky ground financially and are propped up entirely though hype and speculative credit.
Actually, Musk is not running the day to day operations at spacex, so removing spacex is not really a big need. He was driven out successfully from there a few years ago. But he's still wrecking havoc at tesla.
He's been talking to Putin regularly for years now. The damage has already been done.
Starlink + Twitter = propaganda mills deliver him Ukraine
How do you think he launches those Starlink satellites?
Yeah, well I am guessing he wasn’t talking to Putin about electric cars or Twitter.
Starlink + Twitter = propaganda mills deliver him Ukraine
How he launches those satellites has nothing to do with our exchange unless I missed something.
I'm simply pointing out that any platform to influence public opinion and dialogue is likely of great interest to Russia. That's kinda their schtick
Edit: but yes I absolutely think it's absurd that they didn't pull his clearance and sanction him both directly and indirectly. It's just that Twitter gives Putin an edge in having Trump elected, in which case Trump extracts retribution for 'being caught' by witholding Ukraine funding in an attempt to gather intel on Biden. If Trump wins he's gonna want nothing more than to see Ukraine crushed. Putin wants Ukraine and it's a very easy opportunity