Elon Musk vs Elon Musk: Late Capitalism a Survival Guide Addendum

Thanks to our Patreon members for helping to make this episode possible and we're now available on all the major podcasting platforms. You can find more information at the links below. Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to late capitalism a survival guide on Elon Musk. a bit painful to say that but nonetheless the recent news is so rich in its uh example exemplary power for what we've been discussing I think is worth a pause and so Musk just announced that he's going to take his XAI company and roll it into his SpaceX company those are both private um in preparation for theoretically later this year although many things he predicts do not come true but you know theoretically later this year they're going to do an IPO Why is this of any interest to our story at ev at all?

Well, Elon Musk in some way is both an outlier but a functionally the perfect model for everything we've been talking about uh in the late capitalist series. Why is he an outlier? Because functionally he's a 19th century industrialist. He is not a modern industrial.

He's not a late capitalist guy in some ways because he's actually built things in the real world that real people use in existing markets. So, um, we have Tesla, the car company that actually builds cars. So, he took a niche small electric car maker and turned it into a global electric car producer. So, that is sort of an impressive amazing feat.

They sell [clears throat] lots of cars. It generates lots of money. Sometimes it's profitable, sometimes it's not. Of course, they're having a little trouble these days, but there you go.

He's also built the SpaceX company, which launches satellites. Now, he went into this is a well-developed market, but he kind of uh transformed the market, doing it more quickly at a much lower cost, and so now he does satellite deliveries. So, that's kind of impressive. And he developed the Starlink system.

And Starlink is a satellite communication system. By the way, satellite communications has been around since you know the 50s and the 60s. So this is a 60 70 year old industry. It's not a new industry.

Telecommunications goes uh way you know back before that. Hello Alexander Graanbell. Hello this telegraph. Right.

So that sort of communication at distance information ...