Okay, let's take a look at risk. Elon invested $100 million dollars of his own money. If he loses it all he ends up.... just like the rest of us, with nothing. How exactly is that a huge risk? For us, that's daily life. He'd probably end up much better off in reality though. I'm sure he owns his house, for starters. So he'd invest $100 million, lose it all (was it all of his PayPal money, or just most of it? That's important because if he had even $1M left over that he intended a cushion that's not much of a risk at all really, to lose out and end up a millionaire? Not a risk.), and at the end of the day end up living in a house bigger than most of us could ever afford. He could sell that, go from "financial ruin" to being a liquid multi-millionaire. Or he could have asked one of his PayPal millionaire friends for a "small" loan of X million dollars. Or he could have done what you propose those engineers do and just get a job from somewhere else. I just don't see this massive "risk" here that justifies him now being the second most wealthy person on the planet worth more than billions of people combined.

But let's look at risk further. What about the people strapping themselves to the top of Musk's rockets and propelling themselves into outer space? They are literally risking their lives. All Musk did was put in $100 million dollars. Has anyone ever died from investing $100 million dollars? On one side you have a guy would lose a lot of money and land comfortably on his feet. On the other you have someone strapping themselves to a column of rocket fuel and blasting off to outer space, something many people have died doing. Surely if risk determines reward, and Musk is worth $150 billion dollars, these astronauts must at least be billionaires. Right?

Obviously that's a litter hyperbolic, but it's to prove a point. If we're going by risk/reward, why is financial risk the only thing considered? What about scientific risk? Musk's enterprises are premised on mountains of scientific and engineering work that came before him, work that is mostly publicly funded and for which the original pioneers (taking risks) will never be compensated. Take Tesla's much hyped "autopilot". Did Musk come up with that himself? Did Tesla engineers even come up with it? No, that research came from the government, namely DARPA through their autonomous Grand Challenges robot competitions. In 2005 during the first Grand Challenge the robots were running off the road and crashing into each other. By 2007 they were reliably navigating urban environments. This was after millions of dollars and thousands of person-hours were poured into the research. Did Musk fund that research? Did Tesla? No, you and I did as taxpayers, and we put in much more than the $100 million Musk did. The people doing that research on the ground were risking their careers and forgoing paychecks to do that work. Many of the people doing the actual coding on those robots were being paid $20k per year as graduate students. Who is now benefitting from that research? Musk. Tesla. Private interests.

Or look at the Kennedy Space Center. I just watched a SpaceX launch a rocket from there. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Who built that? I mean physically, who put hammer to nail there and built that thing. It's huge. "It took 1,500 engineers to design the buildings and launch pads. The drawings alone produced by architects and designers weighed more than a hundred tons" [1]. Did Musk take the risk building that? No, the public did, and now it's there for him to use and benefit from. But the people who built that for him with public money won't be seeing a return on investment proportional to the benefit it today generates. Those benefits are privatized largely into Elon Musk's pocket.

[1] https://www.wesh.com/article/looking-back-at-the-constructio...