While your hero might be a guy making a Cybertruck and talking about living on Mars, this guy is my hero.
All of this is needed in the fight. It certainly wouldn't take one man to win it.
He made electric cars a consumer reality.
He is making space travel significantly cheaper.
He is making energy storage significantly cheaper.
He made roof tiles that have a similar cost to regular tiles, but also collect solar energy.
He is making tunnelling cheaper.
He is blanketing the Earth in a RAIS satellite communications network, in a model that can be replicated on other planets.
All of these previously-considered-risky techs converge to promote sustainable energy, transport, communications, space travel, and terraforming.
The fact that he can be a dick doesn't diminish these accomplishments.
However, as an innovator and driver of human progress, he is a godsend.
I didn't like Steve Jobs either. He was a massive dick, but he did usher in the smartphone revolution, and brought U/X to the mainstream.
I don’t understand why so many people just accept the rhetoric of Musk and Gates, so-called “liberal capitalists” (liberal in the modern meaning, not classical liberal).
They made their money through exploiting other people’s labour, that’s the only way you accumulate such capital.
They then go on to donate a vanishingly small amount relatively to recognisable, bleeding-heart-liberal causes and everything they did to get here is forgotten and forgiven.
Is that true? Maybe, but I guess it hinges on your definition of "exploit". I think you can make money (in theory, of any amount) without exploiting people.
> They then go on to donate a vanishingly small amount
Haven't they both pledged to donate 99% in their lifetimes? Plus you could argue the companies themselves (where at least Musk's wealth is mostly locked up) are helpful. At least Tesla.
There would be no excess for the founder if you distribute all the money that a company operation makes evenly to all employees and owners.
That's what they mean when they summon the world "exploit".
Roman slaves weren't exploited in the ways some layman might imagine.
People have a strange reaction to the word 'exploit.' It smells bad, and it gives the sense that those using the term want something to smell bad.
'Exploit' just means 'to make productive use of' to me. Musk 'exploited' his workers? Good. Theyre making cool stuff. That's what he should be doing. A company 'exploited' a uranium deposit? Good. We need those hot rocks for fuel rods.
Hint: Even if you take only 1% of the work but employ 1000 people you are going to get rich.
Your benchmark for what is exploiting seems to not work particularly well in practice.
In many peoples opinion (including mine), yes. This can all be considered wage slavery.
Of course the magnitude and severity varies. A worker in the Gigafactory (probably) has a higher standard of living than the one in the Foxconn factory, who in turn probably has a better standard of living than the worker in the Nike sweatshop. But it’s all the same thing.
Also called a "job". You're telling me I'm a wage slave? (in the last 10 years nobody reported to me, I was never self-employed).
Through this sort of wage slavery in the last 10years, I have achieved an incredibly high standard of living, compared to the regular citizens of any age in human history. I think this narrative is just devaluing the meaning of words and the suffering of those who really are exploited.
And it is an economic system which awards a vastly disproportionate share of resources to people like Musk and Gates that deprives others of those same resources.
Would it be great if more people could achieve prosperity - ideally, _all_ people? Yes it would. However, just "take the money of the rich" is not a solution for this (we can argue about details of taxation, and I don't think in particular USA has a good system, but that's more of "fine-grain detail" in the end)
> it is an economic system which awards a vastly disproportionate share of resources to people like Musk and Gates that deprives others of those same resources.
I've lived in communism. It really is equal sharing of misery, _not_ equal sharing of reward. The reality is that Musk really puts in way more effort & takes a lot more risk than your average factory worker. But at the end of the day - not even that is what matters. What matters is that by attempting this "equal sharing of resources", each and every time it was tried, it resulted in a horrible dystopia. Not sure what it would take to convince people it's an inherently bad idea - but I feel that at least by now the burden of proof should be on the shoulder of those who advocate it.
I'm not suggesting taking money from the rich. I'm suggesting not giving it to them in the first place.
> What matters is that by attempting this "equal sharing of resources", each and every time it was tried, it resulted in a horrible dystopia.
I'm also not suggesting "equal sharing of resources". The idea that the only possible distributions of wealth are "everyone gets the same" and "unbounded in response to supply/demand" is silly. If all the billionaires in the world had $10million instead of $1 billion, and everyone with >$1million's wealth was scaled down in proportion, I'd be happy. There'd still be plenty to work for.
For me, the key issue with communism was too much concentrated power. That lead to inefficient resource distribution, because the people responsible for distributing had perverse incentives which lead to corruption, and even where the leadership was benevolent, they simply didn't have the mental resources to work out how best to distribute things.
Now, markets solve this problem, by allowing everyone to have input into what the economy produces, simply by spending their own share of our economic output. However, this mechanism relies on economic demand being somewhat evenly spread out amongst the population. Otherwise you end up with the same problem: those in control of demand have incentives to pursue their own self-interest, and even where they are benevolent, they don't have the means to determine efficient distribution.
Bill Gate's philanthropy is a good example of this: very well meaning, but hopelessly ineffective given the huge sums of money involved. Notably, this wealth is being distributed just like wealth in communist countries: in a planned way, by a central authority. Extreme wealth concentration circumvents the market mechanism, and should be avoided for just the same reasons as communism.
(honest question, it feels like you have an answer; I just don't see it)
What is money, other than the power to get others to perform economic activity for you, backed by the state? It is given by it's very nature.
(as a side note, I disagree both that Bill Gates' philanthropy is "hopelessly ineffective" or that the rich drive demand - but these are two long discussions/debates in and of themselves)
"If everything is important, nothing is."
Didn't gates massively increase his wealth in the period in which he said he'd give away half of it?
>Plus you could argue the companies themselves (where at least Musk's wealth is mostly locked up) are helpful. At least Tesla.
But would they exist without him? He's certainly been good at marketing himself and by extension his companies. On the other hand he also just bought the rights to the title founder at tesla so the actual original founders can't call themselves that which many people don't seem to realize. Meanwhile they kept hostage battery tech advantage via Panasonic. And then there's spacex and Solar city which happily survived on tax payer funds whilst the later maybe didn't help green energy adoption as much as a competitor might have in it's stead as they basically did Chinese solar panel resale which were going at dumping prices and the EU was blocking for that rezason....And i think they also had/have some fun gov bribery accusations against em which reflects badly on the billions in taxpayer subsidies they managed to waste. Meanwhile whilst an increase in NASA's budget wasn't politically feasible it's been a notoriously monetarily efficient institution.
It's not 1850 anymore.
What alternative do you want to see? Perhaps a world where everyone is using linux and everyone compiles their own software?
It isn't a laughable idea, but the idea that if the labour hadn't been exploited we'd be better off is not a good one. If labour isn't exploited it is wasted; it isn't like programmers or mechanics are a special breed of person who appeared in the modern era. These people are the same people we've always had and the evidence is we get much better results when working within a corporate structure. There wasn't and isn't a law saying that Musk and Gates had to own the the corporations. If workers want co-ops I'm sure they'd manage.
Gates made his money using very shady tactics at the cost of the consumer. Now he uses that money to buy himself a favorable place in the history books by doing things that don't help but look good.
In part, but the other part of that is making software that vastly increased human productivity with a computer at an incredibly competitive price point.
But it's interesting to see that his "old image" already almost vanished. His strategy to "do things that look good" seems to work. Humans have very short memories after all.
I agree
>doing things that don't help but look good
I disagree, they seem to do a lot for vaccinations
But, if you look at all the countries that have successfully won the fight against malaria (many Latin American countries, southern US, southern EU, etc): it wasn't because of vaccines but because of good public administration.
Anyway, sure it's good that money goes to vaccines research. But so far it only looks good. They also spend money on other areas.