girlfreddyThe Hyperloop was never meant to be built. Elon Musk admitted it was all about fueling opposition to California’s high-speed rail project so it would get canceled.
ClbullI miss the days when aristocrats and big business owners were genuine philanthropists and not greedy money-hoarding bastards.
I’d have a much higher opinion of people like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk if they used the vast hoards of wealth they accumulated to build homes, power stations, water treatment plants and other useful infrastructure, especially in the developing world. Otherwise, they’re chasing privatised space travel pipe dreams that we either aren’t going to achieve, or will be reserved only for the ultra-wealthy.
How can we honestly have dreams to colonize Mars, the Moon, etc in the next few decades when we can’t even fix our own problems at home?
They never were. You only think that because philanthropy has always just been an exercise in PR. If you dig deeper into the life and actions of those individuals, you will notice they all suffer from the same pathology.
This is it. If you Google Andrew Carnegie, he’s listed as a philanthropist who built libraries. If you Google the Battle of Homestead, you can see how people literally died to fight for labor rights against him. These people were never good people. We just forgot the bad.
