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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> How can you possibly justify that?

Rockets! Cars propelled by faraway vibrations! Is there no room in our world for the brilliantly mad?

Sure, but it's almost absurd to argue that Musk is the only billionaire alive whose work is a net positive on society.

> that Musk is the only billionaire alive whose work is a net positive on the world

No. But he’s a better bet than many. Including network effects, his work has added value, if only by accelerating retroactively obvious ideas.

Name another billionaire, other than maybe Bill Gates, who's presently doing anything good, at all.

I think this list of philanthropists[1] contains quite a few billionaires. That counts as "doing good" in my book.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philanthropists

To be fair, OP said "billionaire's business venture". So philanthropic work might not apply.

Bezos. Amazon has revolutionised the way we buy things, meaning land is no longer needed for strip malls, oil isn't burnt driving to them, people aren't having inferior things pushed on them by dodgy salesmen, or wasting an hour to buy a single item, or buying the wrong item because the right one is out of stock.

I think there's still quite a significant difference between "popularizing something that may save the planet from extinction from global warming which could have been pursued for quite a while by other large companies automotive and otherwise but hasn't been" to "people prefer shopping with them over how they used to shop". But I can see that the net gain of the time saved using Amazon could be argued as a good for society.

Has Telsa really popularised it? Or is this looking at things from an SV perspective?

Certainly in the UK it's a minor player compared with the Nissan Leaf, and plugin hybrids are even more popular

Well, anecdotally, I'm from the UK, and hadn't heard of the Nissan Leaf until you mentioned it. Tesla, on the other hand... Although yes, actually that's very impressive.

With regards to Hybrids, my (limited) understanding is that they are part of the problem - they're better, but only better by half. From what I'm reading about global warming, we need to push as far as possible towards a fully electric, mostly renewable future as quick as possible.

Plug in hybrids mean you get to pootle around on battery power for local trips to the shop/school/etc, but have a car for long trips

I didn't appreciate that difference in them, thanks.

Add onto that Amazon's systematic, abhorrent treatment of its employees that was required to achieve "more efficient shopping" and the whole thing shows itself as banal, and honestly evil.

I would rephrase as: Who has the guts today to break technological boundaries as strongly as Elon?

... all of them that haven't retired yet?

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