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I was primarily referring to the acquisition of musk's ai company. But the more general (and unfortunately widely accepted practice of) government contracting culture certainly applies to OpenAI and Anthropic as well.

EDIT: cleaned up my comment; removed a more inflammatory claim about corruption in the private sector.

by consensus15 hours ago|

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Who has delivered better value for money on government contracts than SpaceX?

by sportsracersss1 hours ago|

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You can't make that claim for a company that's as deep in the red as SpaceX is. With all of the VC subsidies, the cost of delivering the product isn't reflected in the price they charge.

by yieldcrv4 hours ago|

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fortunately the passive investor bagholding didn’t work, the price sliced straight through their forced buying pressure and only created more shortable shares, as people without share lending sold to passive funds that do

Corruption that stands out to me would be regarding starlink, Elon got the FCC to change power emission rules to hamper competitors with better satellites, but the competitors were able to comply and offer a better service still, while starlink’s existing fleet cannot. meaning elon still would actually have to compete and make a new starlink fleet, which he is doing now. (Basically competitors dont need a base station, and future starlink wont meed a base station either, direct to device ubiquity high speed service is coming) but before that path, he then tried to get an exception from the fcc regulation he promulgated, which was extremely grimy. The fcc didn’t go along.

by dmix1 hours ago|

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> Elon got the FCC to change power emission rules to hamper competitors with better satellites

Didn't SpaceX petition to lessen the rules around geostationary power limits? Why would less rules be corruption? Because it disfavors legacy incumbents? Amazon also benefited from the new rules.

by yieldcrv1 hours ago|

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the order of operations matters here.

they tried to limit the ability of direct to device competitors to function, as the current starlink fleet is practically useless for direct to device. they got their regulatory change, and it didn't limit the ability of direct device competitors to function. THEN their petition came.

by dmix53 minutes ago|

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I still don't see how companies petitioning FCC for rule changes is a signal of corruption. Especially when the existing rules benefited entrenched companies who were petitioning to keep them. And the end result resulted in Amazon also getting a waiver.

by yieldcrv38 minutes ago|

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because his involvement with the current administration after spending $300 million to begin with, and the subsequent appointments to the FCC that were being leveraged to begin bully other companies out of existence? it just happened to be unsuccessful and resulted in him trying to then get a waiver from his own insidious rule.

all you have to do is imagine being an investor in the smaller companies that had to navigate around the unnecessary rule change, and spend more time helping the FCC see why Elon was coming back to get starlink exempted from the rule

what stands out to me is that in other countries that we aren't conditioned to respect, we call the exact same interplay "corruption". there is no nuance, there is no "well its not bushels of cash in a back alley, it's a campaign donation and following the process proscribed by the legislature and unexpected court rulings", its just "corruption"