Elon Musk

[The Grand Nudger]

The people who actually invented the things and did the engineering work to have musk get credit for their achievements would be super happy to know that no one is saying we shouldn't take them seriously.  Just the carnival barker with the fashy fetish.

Guys out there pitching ai in space right now, even as his company says it's a pipe dream, officially.

None of the things Musk's engineers, technicians and laborers created would have happened without him. Surely you must understand that. No Elon Musk, no electric car makers outside of China. No Elon Musk, no reusable orbital rockets delivering payloads to orbit for a tenth of the cost it once was. No Elon Musk, no Starlink delivering internet access to anywhere on the planet.

I don't know why I have to keep pointing out these facts. We are all atheists and if there is anything we all have in common, it's that we value objective facts over emotional attachments.

Elon Musk is the latest in a long line of supreme assholes that nevertheless contributed greatly to society. Denying his contribution is denying reality.

Most of those things -did- happen without him, even after he bought his way into them..so I'm having trouble understanding the question?    

Elmo didn't invent the electric car, or even his company's electric car.  He bought it.  He then risked the entire enterprise to bail out his cousins dying solar enterprise - both of which currently getting their lunch eaten by chinese producers with a better product.  Tom Mueller is who you have to thank for the falcon 9...his merlin itself based on the principles learned from the lunar descent module, most of that process occurring at a company called TRW.  He's currently trying to tank spacex - which exists largely because of the us taxpayer.  Cubesats were the brainchild of Bob Twiggs and Jordi Puig Suari of Stanford and Cal Poly, respectively.  Starlink is, ofc, indispensible to the goal of guiding russian missiles into ukranian maternity wards.  

Yes, we're all atheists, but atheists aren't particularly immune to hero worship.  His contribution was money, it's always money.  He got extremely lucky in the dotcom bubble. There are your objective facts. Additionally, and continuing to speak objectively, he is using that money...more and more of it our money, his only real contribution to anything...to destroy the united states, fresh off a manic bout of murdering people in not hereistan. It would not surprise me to find him listed in some future textbook as having greatly contributed something to humanity...but probably not what you're thinking of.