You're cherry picking a handful of nerd billionaires who are getting into, lets face it, a pretty big gamble right now. SpaceX is the only success story of all the commercial space companies and the whole "The rich will find a way to become immortal and sell us the serum" scenario is this weird opposite of classism.

I'd also add that this mentality is why we had kings and dicators in human history. We're just too prone to thinking a few alpha males will Fix Everything and pesky things like division of power, politics, just get in the way of our Ayn Rand heroes. I think you can figure out in the lifecycle of kingdoms and dictatorships that the endgame is never paradise. Its usually a long ongoing nightmare of cronyism and human rights violations.

Weird to see a western person dismiss the incredible priviledge he has and free speech rights and lack of obligations of serfdom/slavery suddenly take up the mantle of 'let the alpha males fix everything you stupid bureaucratic peons.'

Just out of curiosity, do you think these gentle nerds would have thrived in a environment like the one you're applauding? Imagine Bill Joy or Wozniack or Bezos born into a crony capitalistic environment. Something tells me without the nannying of the western enlightened nanny state with its safe streets and cheap public education, would any of these guys have had the class mobility or opportunity to move upwards? Makes me wonder how many geniuses are being pissed away in places where the alpha males rule harshly. The world has probably lost hundreds of north korean and somalian genuises.

1) I'm excited that these billionaires (and many before them) are doing great things with their money.

2) The benevolent dictator tie in was not a wish for benevolent dictatorships, but rather an observation. It's not like I'm dreaming of a future where James Cameron becomes King of America. I kind of like the spot they're in today. Their wealth gives them the opportunity to do amazing things, but we're not at risk of Elon Musk executing a coup.

3) One of my favorite pieces of fiction is the graphic novel Watchmen. I like it because it is such a fantastic critique on the hero archetype. I don't see people like James Cameron or Elon Musk as some sort of infallible hero, but rather I'm amazed that they rise above their flaws to do great things.

My comments were abbreviated, because I don't have time to write a book. I think that my excitement is being interpreted in many different ways, and I'm ok with that, but I want to be clear about what I appreciate, and this portion of your comment really rubbed me the wrong way:

> Weird to see a western person dismiss the incredible priviledge he has and free speech rights and lack of obligations of serfdom/slavery suddenly take up the mantle of 'let the alpha males fix everything you stupid bureaucratic peons.'

That is, categorically, the opposite of the way I feel. As I've already said, I'm not dreaming of King Jobs. I find it exciting/interesting that we're seeing a surge in the number of individuals with the means and the interest in doing great things.

The good thing here is that technically once off planet, you don't have any government to answer too, however I hate to think what regulations the bureaucrats are dreaming up to try and get around this.

What we seem to be seeing is that these "new money" entrepreneurs spend a great portion of their wealth, using their skills at innovation and bulldogging people into doing what they need, to make great changes. It's worthy of note that Rockefeller, who was the worlds first billionaire, donated $550 million through his philanthropy by 1918. He essentially made the University of Chicago. From about 1900 to 1940 his personal wealth was steady at approximately 1% of the US GDP. More notable still, is that from his first pay check he gave 10% of his earnings to his church. His funding of medical research was instrumental in the eradication of hookworm and yellow fever.

Bill Gates is rather fittingly working in Rockefeller's shoes.

I think its fantastic that these "new money" billionaires are literally chasing their dreams and dragging us along with them.

I'm 24, and at 16 I was thinking that my chance of seeing another planet or even space was solely reliant on finding some LSD. Essentially I put the factual chance of my seeing space to be 1 in a trillion. With SpaceX and announcements like this, I feel like they must have when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I feel like I should be sleeping in the back seat of my car while it flies me to work and that I'll go vacation on Mars and go for a weekend getaway in LEO.

It's amazing to me that in such a short time that this shit has become possible again.

One wonders if the rise of markets, global communication, etc., have rendered the nation state somewhat obsolete.

In theory, we still depend on our governments for things like public works, for ensuring peace, for promoting justice, and protecting personal property. These are things that we believe corporations would be ill-suited for.

And yet, in practice, at least in the United States and in the PIGS of Europe--we see that hey, holy shit, they've dropped the ball in a lot of cases. I'm willing to wager that we wouldn't be too much worse off with a different system.

Note: I take this position not in support of our new corporate overlords, but out of the necessity born from the realities of our government. If our government actually helped the public, actually had a legal system that worked justly and fairly, and actually did Good, I'd shun the amorality of the free market. But it doesn't, so I can't.

I know, blah blah free markets never existed so a truly free market would lead to utopia blah blah. But, markets right now are freer then they have ever been, and we are still seeing the concentration towards aristocracy. More freedom of market would probably swing more towards this, as the current owners of stuff would just demand all output of workers (including any thought they ever had) reducing the ability of new entities to exist to create the churn assumed in free markets. Unless you get rid of IP and large portions of property rights (and in the later case, unfreeing the market by standard definitions). Basically, a system without feedbacks will move to extremes.

I would think the thousands of regulations added every year would reduce the amount of "freedom" in the market.

Are you willing to bet your life?

If our government actually helped the public, actually had a legal system that worked justly and fairly, and actually did Good, I'd shun the amorality of the free market. But it doesn't, so I can't.

For one thing, any government is amoral at best. Laws are only approximations.

For another thing, the US government and the governments of the states I've been able to visit do help the public. They are not perfect. The problem with anything approaching anarchy, or even some sort of pure free market utopia, is that those things are not yet politically stable in the current context. Regardless of how good or bad life in one would be, a nation state or some other large polity will come over and destroy such an entity. Perhaps technology will level the playing field somehow.

Is the legal system perfect? No, but I'll take my chances in Houston over Mogadishu any day. And the extent to which the government tries to prevent the spread of certain communicable diseases, dissuade people from stealing from and raping strangers, maintain infrastructure, I would say they do help people in these ways and myriad others. Granted, they do this rather imperfectly. That's just real life.

I merely mean to point out that the idea that governments are the solely-enabled providers of the Good is being threatened by the advent of enabling technologies and poor precedent set by governments themselves.

Well you have to consider that people who were able to make a great amount of money through capitalistic means usually are not "EVIL" people. Because they have to sell their products/services to others, they need to please their clients/customers on an everyday basis. They have to have a rather good profile in order to keep their business going (and their own organization, for the matter).

You'd rather have to wonder about politicians, who get rich by diverting voters' resources, misusing the state money, and lying about their own responsibilities. And in History, they have been the fat cats enslaving populations and mass-murdering people. We have yet to see any example of this happening in the private sector.

Anyway, rich people are not unique in terms of profile. How you make your own money tells a lot about you and what you are really worth.

What I really want to read in the press is how "100,000 hackers from the online site called [insert Hacker News/reddit, etc] worked cohesively for X years and were instrumental in solving problem Y."

Certainly there must be some problems where a large number of people can solve them together.

I'm with you on the enthusiasm, but consider:

a) the history of previous innovations like railroads and flight. Private actors have always made big contributions, it's just that government was often an early client or monopoly grantor. The big projects that government finances and implements directly tend to be things like defense and infrastructure.

Edit: relatively low tech but large infrastructure - giant damns, highway systems, rural electrification. I've always thought of NASA as a half-defense project. But this is a tendency rather than an iron rule, the pendulum swings back and forth on public/private sector involvement.

b. Hell no, it's not possible to do these things on your own. you need a team (who share some executive power) and a pool of labor, and ideally you stay open enough (like Steve Jobs) to the innovative bubbles that bubble up from any part of your organization. An individual with sufficient capital and vision has the opportunity to overcome the economic inertia of a big project and get things moving, but to look at it as something you do 'on your own' is to fall into an ego trap right out of the gate. Extreme example of this: Muammar Gaddafi.

c. Bureaucracy is a side-product of organization. Government is bureaucratic because it has reasons to persist as an organization. But almost all commercial entities have bureaucracy of their own, proportional to the size and complexity of the organization. Bureaucracy can be annoying or inefficient, but it is not a bad thing in itself: it's just organizational infrastructure and an entirely rational division of labor. Naturally, there's a problem when the interests of individual bureaucrats or bureaux come into conflict with those of the organization as a whole, but that's often the result of an incomplete or inchoate conflict resolution process. In the right circumstances it can be an asset; the software company my wife works for originally threw its product together as an internal job-tracking tool for paper-based archive/records management. Nowadays what used to be its core business is outsourced to subcontractors.

The fulcrum of decision making was remarkably focused on a single point: him.

And yet the company has not undergone a dramatic collapse since his death. This is because he built a strong organizational infrastructure in which he played a central, but replaceable, role.

I don't know the end game for capitalism [...]

I don't believe there is one, any more than there's an end game for math or physics. Capitalism is in my view a phenomenon rather than a philosophy, as is communism (in the non-ideological sense of people doing things together for mutual benefit). As I get older I think a great deal of political conflict is the result of a confusion between means and ends, but that's another story.

Slight digression, but I was interested in your last few sentences. Why do you not think that math or physics have an end game? I think that academic mathematics is dead/worthless, for instance.

Maybe you're talking about the difference between "ideals" and the incarnations of those ideals.

Capitalism is indeed an ideal, but its incarnation (so-called "global capitalism") might disappear as the dominant mode of human interaction. Here's hoping. This has happened in the past, right? E.g. there is no "Feudalism" as such, any more, even if concepts of feudalism are used.

Similarly (going back to Math), "Math" as such will never die - but its incarnation (the mass of all people doing all Math) might have an end game.

I'd actually love a math revolution, since I love math, but it doesn't look like it's going to be easy to re-invigorate it.

That is, I believe, a genius true of of any great leader: the ability to surround yourself with people who are capable of greatness, then having the confidence to let them be great.

The logical conclusion of that is feudalism, and I think with more or less the same consequences. Basically:

• You'll get some good kings and some bad kings

• Some will be into exploration for wealth, prestige and to further an ideology

• Wealth and power will be passed down through families

• A person being a good king is probably a bad predictor of their great grandson being a good king

Democracy and a strong central government aren't an optimal solution to the distribution of power, but they do tend to average out systematic performance over time to produce less ups and downs. Technology and finance seem to be the largest pseudo-king making disciplines these days, but I'll leave musing over their relative distribution of good and bad kingliness as an exercise to the reader.

By extension, you can fix a problem by killing/overthrowing one person.

The truly scary thing about both governments and corporations is that they are remarkably resilient power structures. Consider: would removing/jailing/prosecuting the entire board of directors/C-level officers of a company truly kill it? Could it just be taken over? Would its property, patents, IP, employees, etc. become public property, or just food for another entity?

It's pretty terrifying, actually.

This is a very interesting point. One of the very best things democracy offers is reasonable hand-offs of power. Has any country tried something like "electable kings"? There would be one monarch who gets voted into power, who then has ultimate control (subject to a Constitution or something). Then, upon death, the country holds an election and a new monarch is voted in?

Or, in between, what's the longest any particular head of state is elected for these days? In the US, the president is in charge for 4 years, which seems like too short of a time horizon to implement any sort of long-term plan. Any countries out there where they are elected, say, 10 years at a time?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie#On_wealth

Taking a devil's advocate approach here, the scary thing is that individuals are now vested with the power of a nation state.

That hadn't happened in human history, and I think it's inevitable we will get such technology in this century. And this is much scarier than swapping president for CEO.

Its called Fascism, and its no nugget.

SpaceX + Xe (Blackwater) == DOOM. We will turn back to government to save us from these crazies, I'm pretty sure of it ..

I think you've made the mistake of reaching a conclusion by cherry picking. You think of a few select cases like Page, Musk etc. and think maybe it's good there's a concentration of wealth, that there are billionaires. But you are ignoring all the other billionaires and "fat cats" who are arguably doing bad or selfish things, who aren't pusing the human race forward, just being parasites. Does the existance of Musk, Cameron, Bezos, etc. efforts somehow more than outweigh the negatives of the other guys? Perhaps. But we can't ignore the other folks, the more parasitic aristocracy, like the Koch brothers, possibly the Rockefellers, the Morgans, etc.

What do you expect the "center" of a food distribution network (Koch Brothers) to look like, besides a big fat cat? A big fat cat isn't too bad, as long as it's sleepy.

These people - Page, Musk, Schmidt, etc. - are about organizing the minds of society, so they are going to be different. Fat heads with big old asteroid-mining ideas :)

Who among their other evil schemes spent $100 million to fund cancer research at MIT:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H._Koch_Institute_for_Int...

Parasitic aristocracy? Do you feel the same way about the folks who give millions of dollars to political causes you support?

Also... Like Gates, the Koch brothers were born into wealth. He's made more wealth by running and owning businesses that make the rest of us less healthy, then he wants to be painted as a philanthropist -- which is something he can buy, anyone can buy, at that level of wealth. And there are tax reduction incentives to do it. And he's one of the biggest behind-the-scenes manipulators of political discourse in the US, which greatly distorts the public debate, and the actions of Congress, away from carrying out the express wishes of the vast majority, and away from doing what's in the best interest of society as a whole, toward things that favor him, and his kind, personally. He is a force for those who say, "Screw people who are less well off than me, with less talents or abilities or family resources than I had. Every man for himself!" So yes he's both parasitic, and part of an aristocracy, and a net lose for society, despite any "positive" thing he may have done. We don't judge Hitler on the whole based on the fact that he kissed some babies at political rallies, or that he funded national exercise programs for German youth. We judge him based on the full spectrum of things he did, including the very bad things he did, that he chose to do, intentionally, and that hurt others, that hurt large numbers of other people -- that dominates his legacy. That's how I evaluate Koch, and how I think you should as well.