Can you not? Like, how about people who have made major academic or philosophical breakthroughs? Major authors? Even within business, or celebrity, Elon doesn't stick out much other than filling a small niche.
The problem with naming them is that then it becomes a discussion on whether the people I've named are impressive. Someone mentioned Einstein and was downvoted. Einstein is very obviously more interesting and accomplished in my mind than Elon, but he's one of many. Turing was 23 when he wrote his thesis on algorithmic computation. There are people with multiple turing awards out there.
If your yard stick is "rich person who made more money" yes, or "CEO who makes memes", or "is a celebrity", Elon is impressive relative to the general population. It's a sad, sad way to measure accomplishments, but sure.
The point is they needed to make multiple significant independent breakthroughs in established fields.
Turing like a lot of pioneers is seriously overrated. When surrounded by low hanging fruit it’s easy to seemingly make a great deal of progress especially when your credited with formalizing existing ideas or making that one last step into usefulness.
Einstein actually pushed boundaries in a well established field which is vastly more impressive. Musk significantly pushing the boundaries in cars, rockets, computer networks, and banking is quite impressive in that context. We can quibble about PayPal, but I am being consistent in ignoring the charging network and self driving system etc as those are emerging fields. Clearly he’s not operating alone, but few people did.
Newton is perhaps the most obvious example of significant progress in independent and established fields and IMO far more impressive, but it’s really not a long list.
The requirement to list someone isn’t to judge that person it’s to judge your standard and demonstrate a flaw in your argument.
Purely objectively, Musk is the second richest person on the planet to the possible exclusion of dictators. That in and of it’s self is rarified air. Winning the silver in say diving isn’t nearly as impressive simply because the is so much less competition. The Marathon is perhaps a closer analogy except that’s a more question of genetic gifts than pure grit.
Doing that and starting a single business like Bill Gates is a true accomplishment, but he’s done multiple independent and highly successful companies. That’s rarified air over the history of humanity.
You personally might not value such things, but that’s simply not an objective standard. Doing that and only making high speed low latency global internet available around the world would be enough on it’s own to be worth talking about. This isn’t a small thing a lot of people failed to tackle the exact same problem. Except Starlink alone isn’t what people think about which is a sign of just how much the guy got done.
The guy literally launched his own car (that his car company produced), into Mars orbit using a rocket that his other company built.
Both of these companies have become the largest companies in their respective fields and can arguably be labeled the two most complex and highest barrier to entry industries. Sending humans into orbit has only been accomplished by large nation states, no company has even done that besides SpaceX. As for car manufacturing, it’s been over 50 years since a new competitor has entered, and only Ford and Tesla have never gone bankrupt.
To anyone trying to argue this isn’t the most accomplished human alive, give me a friggin break
The problem with naming them is that then it becomes a discussion on whether the people I've named are impressive. Someone mentioned Einstein and was downvoted. Einstein is very obviously more interesting and accomplished in my mind than Elon, but he's one of many. Turing was 23 when he wrote his thesis on algorithmic computation. There are people with multiple turing awards out there.
If your yard stick is "rich person who made more money" yes, or "CEO who makes memes", or "is a celebrity", Elon is impressive relative to the general population. It's a sad, sad way to measure accomplishments, but sure.