Assuming they actually use the money to pay people to do science-y stuff, it might work out okay. Even if there is nothing that directly comes out of it, there could be benefits from pouring massive amounts of money into this field. The International Space Station seems that way sometimes. It seems like we’re spending billions of dollars to do somewhat silly stuff like see if dandelions can grow in space. But the side benefit is that lots of people are employed in the space technology field which creates a lot of trickle down benefits.
This is an administration waging a full-on war against science-y stuff, so I don’t think this is a very safe assumption.
And it only got worse from there.
NPR: Top scientists warn that Trump policies are causing a ‘climate of fear’ in research
Soviet Russia had nothing but a climate of fear, and they still got to space first.
Besides, if there’s one thing Nazis are good at, it’s building rockets.
Mainly because the USSR invested early in a dinosaur of an ICBM that the USA would never have bothered with. The R-7 was a “zeroeth generation” ICBM, almost more of a proof of concept than a practical military missile. But it was what the USSR could build in 1957, and if what the Kremlin wanted was to scare the living crap out of the folks at the Pentagon, they succeeded. The Space Race was almost an incidental by-product of this.
Not the same at all. Russia actually wanted science to succeed. Trump wants to suppress science.
Here are more articles to demonstrate:
Reuters: Trump funding freeze upends agricultural research at US universities
It goes on and on.
Russia was in a race with the United States, as each power tried to beat each other to innovation, trying to get an edge on one another on the world stage. There is no such race today, nobody challenging the US and nobody the US is trying to overcome in the field of science. Just a race to the bottom.
[Moderating]
Calling other posters “cunts” is too overtly misogynistic, even for the Pit. Avoid this sort of language in the future.
No warning issued.
[/Moderating]
Well, here’s your classic good news/bad news.
The bad news is that Tesla stock is up 4.6% today, on a very good market day.
The good news is that Tesla waited until the market was closed to announce first quarter results, in which they missed earnings estimates, with Q1 profit down 71%. After market trading on the stock was generally flat, so we’ll see what happens tomorrow… maybe a lot of this is already priced in. But keep up the good work, haters!
See also the Tesla-specific stock price discussion beginning roughly here:
This made me smile:
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/25/nx-s1-5369456/anti-elon-musk-bumper-sticker-tesla
Entrepreneur has now made thousands on anti-Elon stickers.
//i\\
And made a more-successful business than Musk.
Looking for a sweet CEO gig? Tesla’s hiring!
Why does my mental compiler interpret “the board’s push, which, according to the report, was sparked by Musk’s heavy involvement with the Trump” as “the board finally realized that it needed to cut the toxic lunatic loose”…?
Well, all the de rigueur denials are already flying, but it’s a nice thought.
Boy that decision last year to give him that $56 billion bonus has sure paid off. /s
Elon Musk, the Deshaun Watson of Tesla.
The decline continues.
At this point it wouldn’t surprise me if Tesla goes belly up even if the board of directors managed to oust him from the company, not just for ruining the brand with his toxic antics but also for saddling Tesla with a huge backlog of increasingly unsellable Cybertrucks,
Yes, Elon’s policy of doing no market research really paid off with that one!
To be fair, all Tesla models’ sales are cratering due to muskhate. Well deserved muskhate.
Looking across many industries and multiple decades, many decent businesses and products died a horrible death from being introduced at the wrong point in the business cycle.
The CT had the misfortune to enter large scale production just as that mostly exogenous muskhate shock hit. And had no reservoir of market momentum to carry it across the ongoing abyss.
I’d say it, like many idiosyncratic autos before it, had a decent shot at routine success and an outside chance at extreme success. It just didn’t happen, mostly due to bad timing.
None of which excuses musk from being a raging psycho threat to all of humanity.
I think a high price and serious flaws were going to hurt its sales and reputation regardless of Musk’s extracurriculars.
I can objectively say there are definitely some good features in that metal fuglytruck. It’s apparently really easy to drive and corners well for a truck. Maybe future models could have built off of its good points and tried to fix the bad ones, as happens with many new products. (Look at the original iPhone and look at how much it has improved over the past couple of decades.) But it probably won’t get a chance for the very reasons you stated.
The dilemma for the company is that Musk’s continued tenure is the only thing propping up the stock price, because there continues to be this mystifying cultish belief in his entrepreneurial techbro superpowers. If the board ousts Musk, that cult evaporates, and Tesla stock collapses down to its proper valuation, somewhere in the $20-25 range, which means the company financially implodes. They have to hang onto the tiger’s tail and hope for the best.