Through a distant mirror
Leaving aside the obscenity of any person becoming a trillionaire, let alone a billionaire, and one further more with not a charitable bone in his body, the IPO of SpaceX is a massive gamble. The gamble is that it will make a fortune from AI.
The company is so large that pension and investment funds have no option but to include it in their portfolios, so we are all, in a sense, gambling on its success. A success more over which will involve huge economic shocks, quite possibly wipe out millions of jobs and destroy tax revenues for whole countries. Not to mention the environmental damage the huge data centres necessary to its working create.
It also makes a keen supporter of the far right around the world an endless source of backing and finance for the worst amongst us.
In short this is not a good idea. It is risky, damaging in ways we can only imagine and makes increasingly large parts of the economy un-taxable, while destroying the parts that have to pay tax now.
We seem to be returning to a medieval system, where the ultra rich are immune from tax or any other obligation, because they have a monopoly of power and wealth. They will justify this, as they did in the past, by claiming that it is only they who can protect the rest of us, that they provide employment, and that we should all be grateful for the scrapes that fall from their table; or trickle down economics as we now call it. (See Barbara Tuchman’s A distant mirror. )
Only the little people pay tax, and as in medieval times, if they want to pull themselves up by their boot straps they need the support and permission of a “noble” like Musk. Because he owns all the resources they need to succeed and he will demand an outrageous cut of other peoples’ wealth creation as the price for allowing them to make a living.
IF SpaceX and AI more generally succeed as Musk and others want it to, we will return to a system of noblesse but without the oblige.
From Jonty Bloom Media Ltd
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
SpaceX shares soared almost 20 per cent on Friday in the biggest stock market debut in history, giving Elon Musk’s rocket and AI group a valuation in excess of $2tn and making him the world’s first trillionaire.
I think the comment about the return to medieval systems is prescient. Will we, indeed are we already, vassals of Google, AWS, Apple and Meta, etc to which you can now add OpenAI and Anthropic. Reliant on them for the means of living? This can be traced back to the moves of the late 1970s to deregulate the markets. What will be the Magna Carta for the AI era? Who will be our Robin of Loxley?
(*for the avoidance of doubt, Loxley is of course just outside Sheffield making him a Yorkshireman 😁)