I don't think being rich is his end goal. His goal is to do great things, to advance humanity (in very specific ways), maybe having a great legacy. Being rich helps him achieve these goals, but so does building hype and being present in the media. Being rich and unknown isn't a great strategy to achieve his goals.
> Being rich helps him achieve these goals, but so does building hype and being present in the media.
Does it? I know literally nothing about the personality of the Wright brothers. Or Henry Ford. Or Thomas Edison. Their legacy is their inventions. Hype and media coverage are temporary at best. And unfortunately, Musk's hype and media presence tends to show him at his worst. I'm not sure whether Musk fans realize how many non-fans actually despise the guy. If anything, he's wrecking his legacy. Shut up and build stuff.
Alternative take, things like the space program; while there are some prominent names in there like Wernher von Braun and Louis Armstrong, the endeavour which changed human history was an endeavour by many people, not just a few individuals with Personalities. Same with other current endeavours like nuclear fusion and the LHC; I can't name any individual person behind those projects. They are a lot more selfless.
Meanwhile, there's great engineers working at both Tesla and SpaceX, but the only person you know is Elon.
I mean, Thomas Edison may as well be a 200 year old Elon Musk. Practically all he did was be a hype man.
Ford was pretty similar from my reading.
Both men had early career success and worked harder than most at achieving their goals. But their ongoing successes were very much political and public perception. Ford especially was incredibly politically active and noisy about it.
I imagine Elon's legacy (should he be remembered) will not be his twitter shitposting, but electric cars and rocketry.
> But their ongoing successes were very much political and public perception. Ford especially was incredibly politically active and noisy about it.
Nobody remembers Ford's political activism. Apparently he ran for US Senate once and lost. Is there any reason to think that Ford's political activism had anything to do with the success of the Ford Motor Company?
Ford hyping cars is fine and expected. Ford hyping politics doesn't really seem to add anything. In fact, it appears that there were some antisemitic writings associated with Ford, there was a lawsuit and a consumer boycott, and he was forced to apologize.
A common fallacy is to assume that everything a successful person does in life contributes to their success. OJ Simpson was one of the greatest football running backs ever, and he was also a murderer. You might say, "if he wasn't a violent person, then he wouldn't have been a great running back", but somehow Barry Sanders managed not to murder anyone.
Edison and Ford had the small detail that the product they sold became widespread among the population very quickly.
They represented the last effort after standing on the shoulders of giants, basically being the person who got to sign off the quality of life improvement and reap the financial reward. It happens, could have been somebody else but in the end it was them.
mr.Musk has been at the helm of Tesla for 20 years and his product is nor widespread (only 1% of total number of global vehicles sold in FY21) nor revolutionary from a quality of life standpoint (at the end of the day it's a car and you can hardly tell the difference between Tesla EVs and MercedesEQS, iBMW, Toyota EVs etc....if anything the Quality Of life gap is towards the other automakers)
That's like saying a 1930 Ford Model A is not that different from a 1930 Cadillac. That doesn't mean that Ford didn't change the automobile industry in a historic way before 1930.
Yes. Tesla changed the way people feel about Tesla.
Importantly, some of those people were in positions of influence at other auto manufacturers. So Tesla didn't have to capture 95% marketshare to change the industry.
I think that the blinding glamour of a Tesla has faded quite a bit. I think, 20 years on, we expect to see strong competition to them. The lane assist, the adaptive cruise control, the touch screen console... these are a bit boring now. Others have had them for a long time. Some probably had them before Tesla. Hopefully, several competitors will start offering 500 km range EVs. Tesla can still cult that advantage.
But the cult of Tesla scared established players. Everyone has scrambled to adapt since. And the public has been persuaded to keep the pressure on. Tesla represents an historic shift. I don't have to like them or buy them. But I recognize their place in history.
I have not enough karma to make the point above and not risking ending up underwater.
But the hell with it...I can always delete it.
I think people are taking crazy pills, they religiously follow this guy and his delusions about becoming a multiplanetary specie before the Sun becomes a red giant....5 billions years from now.
As they have such thoughts they have to walk through human feces and scenes from the Walking Dead...only with the homeless instead of zombies.
Stuff that would scare them to death if they saw it in a movie or compel them to pity if they happened in the background of a live news reportage from Ukraine.
Instead it's happening under their nose as they wonder if Mars is ambitious enough or we should aim directly for the Andromeda Galaxy.
I can't buy this. He very clearly seems to relish public attention for its own sake. Otherwise we'd have to accept that his hyping of random crypto tokens (e.g. DOGE) is somehow indirectly connected to saving the world or advancing humanity.
but he was the only black person I've ever met who hated Barack Obama. He was an extreme Republican, thought Democrats all worked for the anti-Christ, etc.
I figured there was no way he'd succeed at what he was trying to do because he'd need to make nice with the government no matter who the administration was. I haven't heard from him again.
I see Musk going down the same road. I can only imagine the last man is dying on Earth 1000 years from now and cursing: "If only Elon Musk didn't have to post that tweet we would have made it to Mars."
There’s absolutely no reason to believe he’s on the right track
No science says “yes rockets and spreading through the stars is definitely the future for humans.”
The odds he’s just exacerbating damaging industrial feedback loops and a worse mess for the future are much higher than successful Mars colonies and extrasolar expansion coming from his efforts
He uses that attention and focus in ways that benefit the world at large. Like helping build more ethical AI's, or getting people to Mars. There's nothing wrong with that IMHO.
My concern is he losing his focus. I know I get distracted from the work I am supposed to be doing (sometimes my paid job but even more so at home). I really should be finishing some home renovation work but there is that mail box I need to finish, and the 3D printed lid for a mouse trap, and the synthesizer I am thinking of building, oh wait there is an nice branch from the plum tree we trimmed that I could turn into a flute on the lathe...
Elon really needs to focus on the energy and transportation thing that he really is good at.
sorry to pick you up on this, and i’m unable to phrase this in such a way as to not sound inflammatory (again, apologies):
* which ethical AI would that be?
* how many people has elon sent to mars now?
elon has marketed an image to people, one of a tony stark-like figure, that might do or say the wrong thing at the time, but who truly wants to make everything better.
the reality is that, whilst perhaps not a conman (although i find my opinion of him leaning to that end more each day), he’s definitely just another profit-driven business man, with little to no regard of the people around him. and probably a sociopath.
bill gates has done (a lot) more for humanity. and i’m not particularly fond of him, either.
There is something wrong instigating further extreme resource exhaustion to serve boyish Star Trek pipe dreams.
There’s absolutely no guarantee he’s on the right track. Humans expanding away from Earth is as likely as us being able to rewrite the speed of light.
There’s no rewriting the fundamentals of reality. One really bad day and Mars colony is wiped out. How much damage we do here before getting there is a real concern.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people consider some problems here on earth to be hopelessly intractable, but simultaneously consider a livable human colony on Mars to be not only achievable, but also not subject to the same supposedly intractable problems of today.
There really isn't a comparison between engineers figuring out how to build a sustainable biosphere on Mars, and the problems that we're presumably discussing on Earth, like climate change and pollution, which are political problems inasmuch as billion dollar business models are benefiting from them, and actively fighting your efforts to interfere.
I like how you try to extricate getting to Mars as it’s own thing despite the industrial effort to do so exacerbating climate problems that are political problems.
Please, go on. I want to hear more about how thermodynamics can be waved away for “just an engineering project.”
This is what I mean. Obsession and success with engineering has titillated people to the point of blind faith. Externalities do not exist in their conceptual void. It’s become akin to unfalsifiable religious belief.
> I like how you try to extricate getting to Mars as it’s own thing despite the industrial effort to do so exacerbating climate problems that are political problems.
If humanity doesn't spend the resources on spreading humanity throughout the universe, then the resources will be spent on disposable plastic toys that fill landfills. It's not as if an edenic utopia is being despoiled for this boondoggle. Our environment isn't in its precarious state because of too much space travel. We're debating over the disposition of a tiny fraction of our dwindling material resources, negligible in the grand scheme.
> I want to hear more about how thermodynamics can be waved away for “just an engineering project.”
If we have a limited period before climate doomsday, then we'd better get cracking on space travel before it's too late.
You can also be rich and relatively unknown, most rich people are. He chooses to be super public.