People always do this with Elon... it doesn't matter if he's making cars, building rockets or taking on social media, the general consensus is that he doesn't know what he's doing and will fail.
But, who's the richest man in the room? Who was right and who was wrong?
People can hate on Elon all they want, but it's pure ignorance to think that we know any better.
Let the man work his magic, I'm curious to see what he comes up with.
Being rich has almost nothing to do with your ability, talent, or intelligence. It the single most important factor is luck. This is why you often find CEOs looking down on those with PhDs, because they have an inflated sense of self-worth for being "more rich." When in reality a PhD is a very difficult test of your work ethic and creativity, and being a successful CEO is a matter of luck and connections.
Was it lucky that he happened to start what became PayPal with some others? Was it lucky that he took on an Electric car company and turned it into what it is today? Was it luck that he happened to stumble into launching reusable rockets into space?
Are you going to go further on the whole Paypal situation? The fact that he was running the company into the ground, had to be ousted and replaced all of which occurred before Paypal saw any success?
The 'luck' there is that he got removed and replaced by someone far more successful, but retained a large share of stock.
> Was it lucky that he happened to start what became PayPal with some others?
Yes, it was luck. You could say it was 95% luck, because of course the product has to exist to get lucky so it's not entirely luck. If you made a copy of PayPal tomorrow, would you be rich? What if 100 people did? A thousand? You will misattribute this to idea that there must have been _something_ special about PayPal, but the reality is it was luck.
> Was it lucky that he took on an Electric car company and turned it into what it is today?
This one has less to do with luck, because Elon is already very,very rich by the time he is working with Tesla, same thing for SpaceX. However, remember that prior example about your starting up a copy of PayPal? Tesla is not the only electronic car company, and I would personally never recommend someone buy a Tesla, there are simply better electric cars.
So at this point, it is, in my opinion, hero worship, marketing, and giant coffers.
>Being rich has almost nothing to do with your ability, talent, or intelligence.
So we should imagine that most self made rich people's IQ distribution is completely matching the general populations, and similarly for their work ethic, no?
Musk is not "self made rich", his family was already quite wealthy. But I'd guess the distribution is pretty close for rich people in general. Consider some of the outstandingly stupid rich people out there like the "MyPillow" guy or Donald Trump.
Edit: Interestingly, one thing that is more prevalent among the rich is "dark triad" traits[1]. Make of that what you will.
His family wasn’t wealthy, unless you mean well off in the upper middle class sense. His father gave him something like 15k to start his first company.
So his dad gave him $250,000,000,000? Is that really what you're saying?
As you seems to view them as such, I'll say that only a fool under-estimates their enemy. The wise man loves and respects his enemy, and gives credit where credit is due.
Lindell built a large consumer enterprise worth almost 1/4 of a billion dollars. He's had a rough life, struggling with addiction (not unlike Hunter Biden) but got clean and built massively successful business.
Trump built a global brand worth billions on the back of a real estate company worth but a fraction.
Musk is the richest man on planet earth for very clear reasons.
None of those successes were accidents or even luck. It takes vision, foresight, ability, talent, persistence, and hard work to get there. None of the aforementioned traits are traits of stupid people. And none of those three men can be considered stupid. The virtue of their accomplishments are obvious.
Ergo, if they are stupid while being hyper-successful, what does that say about those who are abject failures?
A fool is a genius in his own mind, seeking superiority by bringing other down, yet a genius builds something of value while lifting others up.
Trump, Lindell, and Musk are successful precisely because they are NOT stupid and have built something of value.
What have you built?
You do realize that the three traits in the "dark triad" are also present in people who live on the streets, right? It is almost like every human being is different.
We could use his coffin/capsule for it. A sad, but poignantly dignified monument that shall serve as a warning to others. I suggest the epitaph: "We repeatedly told you that Mars was uninhabitable."
Edit: or perhaps more relevantly: "well, we tried to but you fired us."
It's not a matter of never try, it's more of a matter of what's even practical. Inhabiting Mars is not as simple as just landing a rocket on there with a bunch of people and materials. Space travel requires immense physical training, enormous costs just to get into space, plus there's the issue of handling emergencies if anything goes wrong while on Mars.
It's an idea that's so far off in terms of the technology that we'd need, and there's so many more useful things that are closer to within reach that are still similar pursuits that would be more valuable investments (i.e. asteroid mining, advanced satellite technology, etc.). Making incremental progress is great, but there's still the question of "what would we even gain from going to Mars?". There's no ore that'd make sense to mine, making/terraforming a civilization there when we can't even make one in Death Valley (which already has oxygen) is preposterous, and tourism would be impossible due to the physical limitations of space travel.
It's not that we should "never try", it's that there's no practical reason (right now at least) _to_ try.
You could go back in time before other countries were discovered and make a lot the same arguments about heading out into the ocean on a boat.
Technology will never get to the stage it needs to in order to say live on Mars (or anywhere beyond earth) unless we actively venture out and try to do so.
I think that's the point. It actually doesn't matter if Elon fails in getting anyone to step foot on Mars - by believing it to be possible, he's creating a kind of self-fulfilled prophecy.
Without anyone trying there's 100% chance it'll never happen, and by the time you need it to happen it'll be too late.
Here's a difference: you or I could get on a boat with little difficulty besides sea sickness and wobbly legs. On a rocket, you or I would die or suffer from other physical ailments caused by simply being in space and in different gravitational environments for extended periods of time. This isn't an unknown, it's a known.
On the ocean, you could land on a island, fish at sea, or be lucky and have rain provide water. In space, you have nothing, and guaranteed nothing for weeks, months at a time. Again, this is not an unknown, this is a known.
We're just simply a large number of significant innovations behind where going to Mars is unfeasible, physically and monetarily (namely, human physical/mental limits in space travel, time, supplies/oxygen, emergency response, funding (think of how expensive a single un-manned mission is), etc.)
It would be akin to telling the vikings to make an airplane. They would first need to discover engines, improved metallurgy, electricity, and a thousand other things before it would be possible and practical. The idea of a flying machine has been around for thousands of years, but only in the last hundred or so was it actually possible, and only the last 75 or so practical for an average commercial person. And even then, airplanes can always get more oxygen because they're within Earth's atmosphere.
To make one thing clear, I'm excited about the prospect of interspace travel (how could anyone not be?!) But, Mars as a goal is _so_ far off that it obscures and hides the reality of the steps and innovations that we'd need to make along the way before we can seriously make an effort to do anything productive on Mars that wouldn't be easier, cheaper, safer, and more effective closer to Earth.
But, who's the richest man in the room? Who was right and who was wrong?
People can hate on Elon all they want, but it's pure ignorance to think that we know any better.
Let the man work his magic, I'm curious to see what he comes up with.