and yet, the richest person is still only responsible for 0.1%* of the economic output of the united states.
Musk only owns 0.1% of the economic output of the US but he is responsible for more than this, including large contributions to
Politics
Space
SpaceX is nearly 90% of global upmass
Dragon is the sole American spacecraft that can launch humans to ISS
Starlink probably enables far more economic activity than its revenue
Quality and quantity of US spy satellites (Starshield has ~tripled NRO satellite mass)
Startup culture through the many startups from ex-SpaceX employees
Twitter as a medium of discourse, though this didn’t change much
Electric cars probably sped up by ~1 year by Tesla, which still owns over half the nation’s charging infrastructure
AI, including medium-sized effects on OpenAI and potential future effects through xAI
Depending on your reckoning I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon’s influence added up to >1% of Americans combined. This is not really surprising because a Zipfian relationship would give the top person in a nation of 300 million 5% of the total influence.
i’m happy to grant that the 0.1% is just a fermi estimate and there’s a +/- one OOM error bar around it. my point still basically stands even if it’s 1%.
i think there are also many factors in the other direction that just make it really hard to say whether 0.1% is an under or overestimate.
for example, market capitalization is generally an overestimate of value when there are very large holders. tesla is also a bit of a meme stock so it’s most likely trading above fundamental value.
my guess is most things sold to the public sector probably produce less economic value per $ than something sold to the private sector, so profit overestimates value produced
the sign on net economic value of his political advocacy seems very unclear to me. the answer depends strongly on some political beliefs that i don’t feel like arguing out right now.
it slightly complicates my analogy for elon to be both the richest person in the us and also possibly the most influential (or one of). in my comment i am mostly referring to economic-elon. you are possibly making some arguments about influentialness in general. the problem is that influentialness is harder to estimate. also, if we’re talking about influentialness in general, we don’t get to use the 0.1% ownership of economic output as a lower bound of influentialness. owning x% of economic output doesn’t automatically give you x% of influentialness. (i think the majority of other extremely rich people are not nearly as influential as elon per $)
Musk only owns 0.1% of the economic output of the US but he is responsible for more than this, including large contributions to
Politics
Space
SpaceX is nearly 90% of global upmass
Dragon is the sole American spacecraft that can launch humans to ISS
Starlink probably enables far more economic activity than its revenue
Quality and quantity of US spy satellites (Starshield has ~tripled NRO satellite mass)
Startup culture through the many startups from ex-SpaceX employees
Twitter as a medium of discourse, though this didn’t change much
Electric cars probably sped up by ~1 year by Tesla, which still owns over half the nation’s charging infrastructure
AI, including medium-sized effects on OpenAI and potential future effects through xAI
Depending on your reckoning I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon’s influence added up to >1% of Americans combined. This is not really surprising because a Zipfian relationship would give the top person in a nation of 300 million 5% of the total influence.
The Duke of Wellington said that Napoleon’s presence on a battlefield “was worth forty thousand men”.
This would be about 4% of France’s military size in 1812.
i’m happy to grant that the 0.1% is just a fermi estimate and there’s a +/- one OOM error bar around it. my point still basically stands even if it’s 1%.
i think there are also many factors in the other direction that just make it really hard to say whether 0.1% is an under or overestimate.
for example, market capitalization is generally an overestimate of value when there are very large holders. tesla is also a bit of a meme stock so it’s most likely trading above fundamental value.
my guess is most things sold to the public sector probably produce less economic value per $ than something sold to the private sector, so profit overestimates value produced
the sign on net economic value of his political advocacy seems very unclear to me. the answer depends strongly on some political beliefs that i don’t feel like arguing out right now.
it slightly complicates my analogy for elon to be both the richest person in the us and also possibly the most influential (or one of). in my comment i am mostly referring to economic-elon. you are possibly making some arguments about influentialness in general. the problem is that influentialness is harder to estimate. also, if we’re talking about influentialness in general, we don’t get to use the 0.1% ownership of economic output as a lower bound of influentialness. owning x% of economic output doesn’t automatically give you x% of influentialness. (i think the majority of other extremely rich people are not nearly as influential as elon per $)