It's a serious question. Elon may run some successful companies, but beyond that his credibility has taken a beating on any number of fronts.
How much credit should Elon get for heading companies full of other people who do the actual work? Could another leader do a better job, given Elons unsteady behaviour?
People are seriously confused these days. It's like doubting Einstein's famous statement about the importance of bees and his credibility in general because there's a photo of him sticking out his tongue.
> How much credit should Elon get for heading companies full of other people who do the actual work? Could another leader do a better job, given Elons unsteady behaviour?
He should get full credit for what he does, not minus "Internet bad points" because someone somewhere didn't like something he said.
That's an unfortunate example to choose considering that famous statement ("If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left.") wasn't actually said by Einstein and also isn't true.
There's no conclusive evidence either way, for both things.
The actual alleged quote is 'Remove the bee from the earth and at the same stroke you remove at least one hundred thousand plants that will not survive.' by the way.
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I forgot to link Quote Investigator before: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/27/einstein-bees/
It's as close to conclusive as you can get for any quote misattributed to Einstein (and there are hundreds of quotes misattributed to him). You can't prove someone never said something. At best, you can prove someone else said the same thing earlier.
As for whether it's true,
1) You won't find any scientific study or any evidence supporting it. It was just made up.
2) The evidence against it is that the vast majority of our food doesn't require bees. Grains and staples like corn, wheat, rice, and soybean aren't pollinated by insects. Meat doesn't require bees either, as animals tend to be fed grains or grass. Vegetables generally don't require bees. Many fruits can self-pollinate or aren't pollinated by bees (bananas, citrus fruit, etc.). Finally, even the fruits for which bees are currently essential (kiwis, watermelon) could be manually pollinated if necessary. But even if we lost those few fruits and nuts entirely, humans wouldn't go extinct in 4 years (or at all).
No, there's a written statement by somebody (a contemporary) who "thought" Einstein said it. He may have said it in person. He may have communicated it in an unpreserved publication. We will probably never know. But we can't disprove it. We just have a (weak) testimony from someone with better access to Einstein than we have today.
Honestly, these attempts to "fact-check" and label something as "true" or "false" based on our limited perspective today or even based on studies labeled "scientific" (while studies claiming the exact opposite frequently exist...) are obnoxious and often plain misleading. Reality is uncertain.
> The evidence against it is that the vast majority of our food doesn't require bees. Grains and staples like corn, wheat, rice, and soybean aren't pollinated by insects.
You're trying to disprove your quote, not the one originally attributed to Einstein by Ernest A. Fortin, which isn't about mankind. And how was the situation 100 years ago, without all the carefully bred industrial grain types?
Besides, who wants to try for some empiric evidence?
I think "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left." is the only famous quote about bees by Einstein. The quote you added isn't well known. I agree with you though that the quote you provided is less dubious than the more famous one.
Maybe people should recognize that failure in a domain doesn't mean that same person isn't otherwise highly competent.