SpaceX just got what it wanted from the FAA for Texas Starship launches

My guess its because SpaceX is the best chance to complete the moon missions. Its space race time (with China) so time to streamline the regulations.

I think the FAA can see the writing on the wall – with Musk being so closely linked to the President-elect, come January 20 there is going to be a lot of pressure on them from the White House if they aren't keeping SpaceX happy. So might as well get ahead of the pressure and make them happy now.

Why do people hate Elon so much? If the government is gonna be in bed with any capitalist I am ok with it being the guy who has repeatedly almost destroyed his personal fortune trying to build rocket ships, electric cars, WiFi satellites, and other push the envelope type stuff. I find it hard to believe he is selfishly motivated because he could have just sat on his billions and accrued more money/power instead of taking wild risks to do new things.

Beats being in bed with bankers, pharmaceutical companies, arms dealers and people selling our personal data.

> Why do people hate Elon so much?

Because he hurts people, different people in different ways. There are plenty of examples, e.g. handling the Twitter employees and Twitter users. Elon does a lot of genuinely useful things, but that doesn't mean he doesn't also do bad, selfish things. And even people who aren't directly affected by that see those bad things.

You could say the same about Steve Jobs being a tyrant boss, but despite this he achieved God-like status in tech circles. So did Elon for that matter, before he became a pariah seemingly overnight.

Steve Jobs also had a lot of critics, so I don't see any contradictions here. Many people would disagree about God-like status of Steve Jobs. Same for Elon Musk, he didn't start doing bad things overnight, it was accumulating, until at some point, which was different for different critics, he was worthy of robust criticism.

Steve's assholarity over the years was well documented (he was known for parking in handicapped spaces in a car with no number plates, exploiting a loophole in CA law). They both contributed greatly to the advancement of technology - by telling other people what to invent - yet I never saw the same deranged, visceral hate for that man.