He is cunning to a tee.

“Hey let’s livestream me playing Path of Exile after saying I’m the best in the world, with uncensored live chat from thousands of pseudanonymous gamers with actual experience.”

He’s good at creating the illusion that he’s a genius on a subject for the duration of an informal conversation. Steering away from topics he doesn’t understand, forging signals of deep understanding by mimicking the speech patterns of an expert who struggles to put things in lay man’s terms while namedropping memorized keywords, etc.

If you look at Path of Exile and the Cybertruck, it’s clear that Elon doesn’t know when his promises are unrealistic in a way that will make him look like an idiot. I think he has handlers, not just at SpaceX but everywhere, and those handlers are the real talent. Those handlers know how to cultivate experts that are actually good at their jobs to quietly do the work that Elon takes credit for and how to coach them to make Elon feel good about this arrangement most of the time.

It would be easier to have a satellite in orbit that fires a shotgun at them.

You would need some fancy orbital calculations and precise aiming to make sure the shotgun pellets actually intercept the mirrors, and it would take some engineering to make a shotgun that fires the pellets in a narrow enough cone at high enough velocity to be able to get on an intercept course with most satellites, but you could probably fit it on a Starlink-sized payload. The main issue would be bribing a launch provider to send it up there, but once it’s there you could direct it from the ground without it being traceable to you, and you could have it thrust randomly to dodge anti-satellite weaponry until it runs out of shells.

At some point this would create enough space debris that it could trigger Kessler syndrome, with the debris from destroyed satellites hitting other satellites faster than it de-orbits, until all satellites in low earth orbit are reduced to powder that falls down to earth over a couple of years.

Apart from bribing a launch provider to get the satellite up there, you could probably do either of these for under $10 million, most of it R&D. Much cheaper than developing your own surface-to-space missiles.

Oh honey, that hasn’t been true since 2008.

The government will bail out companies that get too big to fail. So investors want to loan money to companies so that those companies become too big to fail, so that when those investors “collect on their debt with interest” the government pays them.

They funded Uber, which lost 33 billion dollars over the course of 7 years before ever turning a profit, but by driving taxi companies out of business and lobbying that public transit is unnecessary, they’re an unmissable part of society, so investors will get their dues.

They funded Elon Musk, whose companies are the primary means of communication between politicians and the public, a replacing NASA as the US government’s primary space launch provider for both civilian and military missions, and whose prestige got a bunch of governments to defund public transit to feed continued dependence on car companies. So investors will get their dues through military contracts and through being able to threaten politicians with a media blackout.

And so they fund AI, which they’re trying to have replace so many essential functions that society can’t run without it, and which muddies the waters of anonymous interaction to the point that people have no choice but to only rely on information that has been vetted by institutions - usually corporations like for-profit news.

The point of AI is not to make itself so desirable that people want to give AI companies money to have it in their life. The point of AI is to make people more dependent on AI and on other corporations that the AI company’s owners own.