If you have 200 million "of your own money" to spare, you are no longer just a person for the purposes of this conversation, you're a walking VC fund, and you're not really risking a substantial change to your quality of life going from 250M to 50M net worth. Your living expenses are already generously compensated for by the large salary that you, the VC fund pays you, the person, out of your personal bank account, and they will be paying you those expenses until the end of your natural life. This isn't "risk" in the same sense as somebody who jumps to supplement their $150k salary with $450k of founder liquidity because it dramatically changes the material security of their life.
> If you have 200 million "of your own money" to spare, you are no longer just a person for the purposes of this conversation, you're a walking VC fund, and you're not really risking a substantial change to your quality of life going from 250M to 50M net worth.
Is that what happened? I thought he had $200m, and put in $200m.
It's true that that's what I thought, which is my statement. And it's better caveated than the previous one, which implied uncaveated that he still had $50m, but hasn't attracted the eye of any budding skeptics.
Did this guy just literally ask an AI chatbot for insight on SpaceX's classified military plans?
> "It is unlikely that these gaps can be closed until the end of the decade."
I actually worked out my own BFR plan over the couple years of teasers we had leading up to the 2016 IAC presentation. It was based on a 3-part vehicle a bit like Soyuz (separate hab and capsule) of 15m diameter for the launcher and 12m diameter for the upper stage, payload, and capsule, which seemed to offer more options than a 2-part vehicle.
Musk makes some very optimistic plans, some of them clearly without doing the math, and each numerically extraordinary aspect renders the other numerically extraordinary aspects more difficult to believe. Even if you can class 80 or 90% of his ideas as "Audacious but feasible", there are frequent areas where he gets ahead of himself and projects unlikely extremes that become numerical impossibilities in conjunction with each other.
What is clear is that you can launch a colony on Mars based around Starship-like vehicles, but the number of launches per human Mars resident to sustain and switch them out is large ("100 colonists per launch vehicle" is wildly overshooting; Keeping 100 colonists alive for a return mission will require hundreds of Starship-sized launches, some of them years in advance), the risks are large, and that the missions are at minimum conjunction-class (a 3 year round trip) rather than opposition class. A colony that attempts to grow until it approaches self sufficiency demands lots and lots of automation, an expansive ISRU, mining, and agricultural industry, and a population of maybe ~10^4 people; Getting there is going to demand literally 10^5 to 10^6 launches, decades of work, and 10^4 to 10^5 reusable launch vehicles in play for decades.
But it's got to start somewhere; Hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit like "Flags and footprints" and "We can save some cost by using a once-in-a-decade Venus orbital assist" and "We can fit a manned Mars program into a 20 billion dollar NASA budget in theory" does not colonize other planets at all.
Musk & Griffin had a relationship around establishing a Mars colony even before SpaceX foundation. Musk even tried to recruit Griffin when assembling SpaceX founding team.
It depends on the kind of lifestyle you want to live, I guess. If you want to live in a $30M mansion estate with 24/7 domestic staff and have several vacation homes around the world, $50M might not cut it, while $250M should cover it just fine.
If you have a philanthropic bent and want to be able to fund various charities to the tune of $5M or $10M per year (in addition to a reasonably luxurious lifestyle, though considerably less than the above hypothetical), $50M might not be enough to sustain that over time, but $250M probably will.
I think it's fair to say that there's not much difference between net worths of $25M and $50M, or between $50M and $75M. But jumping an order of magnitude from $50M to $250M will let you live a very different kind of life, if you so choose.
Also, that may have kept tesla and spacex 'afloat' but what really saved both companies was billions upon billions of dollars in government contracts, subsidies, preferential loans, and tax breaks. Nevada alone gave nearly two billion dollars to Tesla.
The government is not monolithic and politicians might except other things than what their constituents want. It's a bad test of the value of an investment.
For sure, and it may well have been a terrible investment with terrible returns, but selling to the government and responding to government incentives is an entirely legitimate thing to do, rather than some kind of inherent weakness in a company’s model. A company being “saved” by a government contract is a company being saved by making sales to its largest customer.
Also Elon famously put 200 million of his own money into Tesla and SpaceX to keep it afloat, which is the opposite of cashing out early.