Surely We Can Do Better Than Elon Musk

I agree with this article 100%. In my opinion, Elon Musk is a privileged man who by luck met with some of the great technological visionaries of our time, a.k.a. paypal mafia.

Nobody talks about it, but it is easy to find under-appreciated technologies and invest in them if you are rich and well connected. The unique quality of Elon Musk is that he is willing to bet on extremely risky ventures. There is nothing visionary about electric cars or space ships in our age. As the article mentions, both ventures had investors and smart people working on the area long before Elon Musk was interested in those. Elon's action was not a gambit, it was gamble. Elon got successful thanks to the zeitgeist.

The climate change, China's consolidation of global production forced the US' hand to invest in the success of Tesla and SpaceX. Elon has a lot of friends who is well-connected within the government, and he is well-connected in the business world. His past success as PayPal's co-founder has also helped him to secure funding and gave him clout. Since the US desperately needed to show that the American dream is still alive, Elon Musk became the poster child of the new America. He wasn't sophisticated enough to fit the role, so he became a meme instead.

A bit off topic, but what is the cut off to be a self-made man instead of privileged? Obviously most people would prefer to conceptualize themselves as the former, and most anti capitalists such as Robinson prefer to conceptualize people as the latter, and it mostly seems like a matter of semantics and/or confirming your priors