Elon Musk and His Companies Are Changing the Future of Mankind
thefuturist.co
thefuturist.co
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-08-05...
That comment seems to have been deleted, but I thought it was interesting. I hadn't heard anything about this and it's fairly bad.
Really? You can drive a Tesla around the world? Or did Elon build a plane that I missed? Starship point to point will never happen, at least not in the next 50 years. Starship to Mars, maybe. He also didn't invent the solar panel, he did bail out a failed business by using Tesla to aquire it which is currently dealing with the court and upset investors.
Complaints about his moral character aside (which are numerous!), Tesla vehicles and the Supercharger network [1] gave governments enough confidence to begin combustion vehicle bans [2] (forcing legacy automakers to electrify), Tesla stationary storage bolsters renewables deployments and thermal generation retirement (through cannibalizing the last holdout of thermal revenue, ancillary services [3]), and SpaceX has dramatically reduced the cost to lift to orbit [4]. I'll hold off on cheerleading for StarLink (disclosure: customer) until the constellation is fully operational.
You don't change the world being a chill dude. [5]
[1] https://supercharge.info/map
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
[3] https://www.energy-storage.news/news/undeniable-success-sout...
[4] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/06/air-force-budget-rev...
[5] https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/9/22426973/elon-musk-snl-mon... (The Tesla and SpaceX CEO joked that people sometimes don’t know what to expect from him. “I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship,” Musk said. “Did you think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?”)
However, it's hard to argue that he didn't significantly change the landscape for motor vehicles. I highly doubt we'd have the current level of BEV investment without tesla. Before their vehicles hit the road, the Nissan Leaf was what everyone thought a BEV was. Slow, no range, with batteries that didn't last long at all.