It also depends on what the Twitter board and shareholders want. Will they want to get bought out and owned by someone who clearly doesn't want to own the company, and may run it into the ground out of spite? Certainly some shareholders will just want to take the money and run (the agreed-upon buyout price is quite a premium over the current stock price), but others will be more interested in protecting the future of Twitter as a company and platform.
Agree that there will be a massive legal fight, but my guess is that it will be over how much extra Musk has to pay to get out of the deal (beyond the $1B breakup fee), than over making him perform. But who knows; only time will tell.
He's constantly dragged the company and founders through the mud and the stock dropped 7% once he called the deal off.
I'd sued and settle for a few billion instead of taking the one billion backout
He uses his wealth as a weapon against companies he doesn't like, just the mere threat he may get involved causes massive changes in the stock price
and in turn causes investors to suffer financial lose.
> He uses his wealth as a weapon against companies he doesn't like, just the mere threat he may get involved causes massive changes in the stock price and in turn causes investors to suffer financial lose.
Reminds me of Bitcoin "whales". It's a shame that this guy is the figure that will take humanity to Mars.
> It's a shame that this guy is the figure that will take humanity to Mars
That's just more BS from him. He'll just keep kicking the can, resuming the project with some spectacular stunt every time he needs it. Everything Musk does or says is just a performance to manipulate the markets.
I think the Mars stuff is the least likely to be BS. There's been ongoing, real advancement towards the goal for over a decade now, advancement serious enough that NASA's picked them to land their astronauts on the Moon with their Mars rocket.
A permanent colony seems like the sort of thing he'd get bored with, though.
Establishing a colony on another planet is going to require a monstrous amount of money, time and resources. I doubt a single country could manage it (look at what it takes to run the ISS, and that's a joke comparse to Mars), but there are zero chances a single man, no matter how rich, is going to do more than a dent in that enormous task.
Solving the technology problem is just the tip of the iceberg.
> there are zero chances a single man, no matter how rich, is going to do more than a dent in that enormous task... Solving the technology problem is just the tip of the iceberg.
Agreed, but enabling folks to get there makes it possible.
Musk doesn't have to build the colony to have made it possible, and it seems to be the thing his attention is genuinely invested in.
> Agreed, but enabling folks to get there makes it possible.
It doesn't. Getting a few people to Mars alive does not a colony make. And even that sentence is misleading because while getting to Mars orbit is certainly challenging but that's something I can see humanity capable of overcoming with current technology. Although we never kept humans in space for 2-3 years before which is just the travel there so we don't really have any idea what will happen to them but let's pretend.
Landing very fragile humans on Mars, however, is a much, much formidable challenge. The heaviest object we have managed to soft land on Mars, so far, is the 1025kg Perseverance rover. The Apollo Lunar Module carried two people and was 4280kg dry weight. Of course, you don't need to ascend -- getting those people back to Earth is not even considered by anyone sane -- but still, it shows there's a problem here. And that was two people. And you need everything for them to live on the surface, including air and water and that's even more weight that you can't just slam those into surface at the ~20 000 km/h the spacecraft will approach either.
It would be just about infinitely better if he tried to show off with climate change combat projects. If you want to show off, a vast forest would be much better, much easier to achieve and so much cheaper. He could build storage for renewable energy, these are also sufficiently massive to be good for showing off. And so forth. There are easy but significant things one such as him could do. For a more formidable challenge, elevate the Brazilian people so they don't need to burn the Amazon.
We already have a terraformed planet but the climate is changing in a way which is incompatible with the way humanity currently exists. It would be prudent to change both -- while the change is inevitable it could be slowed and humanity could change too. Once we bought time, we can wait until material and other sciences make space elevators possible and then we can send robots to Mars to build a space elevator too and then we can begin to think about colonizing Mars.
If Starship can get reusable, zero-disposable flight working, and on-orbit refueling, all of those issues become quite surmountable. Mass to Mars (or the Moon) ceases to be "what's the most we can fling in a single launch", and the flight can be shorter if you can depart Earth orbit with a lot more fuel. I can't find numbers for the current iteration, but they were batting around 90-110 day transits with the older ITS proposal.
You start talking about being able to build propellant depots in Earth orbit, build Aldrin cyclers, send large amounts of supplies (or even a whole station on the slow, efficient route) in advance to Mars, etc.
Mars landing of objects is now a TRL9 problem that has been solved already, and the science has moved forward greatly [1]
Recent rover landings happened at what, < 1 M/S ? which is well within the capacity of the human body.
Considering that Mars atmosphere is substantially thinner, and gravity there much weaker, landing there would be different from Earth anyways.
We are not currently employing any of the more cost efficient methods of getting things to orbit in the first place, for large scale missions of epic size, nor are we currently employing the most efficient propulsion types.
The way I see it, the biggest problem is not one actually being discussed which are the longterm effects on the human body of living on a planet without a protective atmosphere, and protective magnetic field [2]. If getting mass to space becomes less of a financial constraint due to more efficient launch mechanisms, then, shielding would much less of an issue because mass in space would be cheaper [3]
I think that much of these problems come down to the huge capital cost, and unsolved problems around low cost launches; the novel technologies that need to be developed & turned into a new space launch system, and no, i am not talking about traditional rockets.
There’s no problem with landing. The weight limitations you mention are entirely a factor if the current “it has to all fit in one rocket launch” limitation.
Our current technology is capable of doing everything you listed and more. The problem is their cost. There is no point to doing it while the cost is this great and there is absolutely no monetary return from doing it. And Musk's effort has been for reducing that cost so that he could do it with the capital he has.
If need be, large countries that have the technology like China, Russia, US could do it. But it would still require gigantic amounts of capital allocation and effort at this stage. So no one will do it. The biggest thing that is happening right now is China and Russia signing an agreement to build a base on the moon. (yes)
The hard part is getting significant amounts of material into space. Once you do that you can do anything there. Go to Mars, build O'Neil cylinders or even make your own asteroid mining factories up there.
Likely is putting it quite mildly - it's likely to cause a premature death in the same way that throwing yourself off the empire state building is likely to cause some injury.
The Americas were divided among people (original inhabitants, and later colonies), and many countries & people weren’t recipients. But I’d still say that humanity has reached America.
Your second sentence makes no sense. If the board and shareholders sell the company, "they" aren't owned by anyone. The board is no longer the board and the shareholders are no longer the shareholders. They're just a bunch of regular people holding big bags of money.
It's like if you sell your car to a dangerous driver: you have no financial stake in whether they go on to crash it.
> It also depends on what the Twitter board and shareholders want. Will they want to get bought out and owned by someone who clearly doesn't want to own the company, and may run it into the ground out of spite?
Uh, yes?
The shareholders, and the board as their agents, care about the company as a means to an end: and that end is making money. They’ve already concluded the sale achieves that goal.
If Musk wants to burn the company to the ground after they cash out, they don't care.
Heck, some of them may invest in competitors after the sale banking on that to make even more money.
The board already willfully agreed to sell him the company and the deal is even better now than at the time they made it. Why would they also want to drop the deal?
The notion that the board is all of a sudden worried about what Musk might do with Twitter is about as silly as Musk thinking he can weasel his way out of a binding contract he already signed.
If you talk to random people in a democracy, they can't vote their interest even if they wanted to, because they don't know what's actually affected by politics and what isn't.
Some people switched to culture/values voting (ie, telling other people what to do), some people just enjoy winning and so vote for whoever they think is going to win.
Agree that there will be a massive legal fight, but my guess is that it will be over how much extra Musk has to pay to get out of the deal (beyond the $1B breakup fee), than over making him perform. But who knows; only time will tell.