Sure, you can say that, but name another person with a more impressive track record of actual accomplishments.
Both Tesla and SpaceX has been discounted so many times before, and despite proving time and time again that they will and can deliver, they keep getting discounted.
Because he doesn't have superpowers.
Making a car that runs on batteries is a feat, ramping up production of an automobile is a feat, but within reason.
Making a humanoid robot, something that nobody else in the world has any clue how to do, and which Tesla has no background in ... well that's more than a feat.
So a better question - why do people continue to believe this guy when he makes such claims?
Boston Dynamics has shown robots capable of dancing. Can Tesla replicate? Maybe not in one year, but for such a project it doesn't really matter if it's late.
These were at the advanced engineering stage after enormous scientific progress of the last few hundred years and going all the way back to beginning of physics and math.
With AI we are at pre-science stage, hunting mammoths with flint arrowheads and wooden spears.
Goes something like this: The guy that took on the military industrial complex with his small little startup and actually won, with wild whacky ideas like landing rockets upright, and winning NASA contracts against the likes of Boeing and Lockheed, is actually not who you think he is.
He’s not?
Nope, even though he was one of the single strongest drivers of electric vehicles that is pretty much making the rest of the industry shift after the viability of electric was shown with Tesla cars. The truth is, he actually sucks.
Oh, what a plot twist. Wait, does this have a happy ending now that we know he’s a really a bad guy?
And then we fill in the redemption story.
It’s the creepiest thing, and I have no idea why we keep doing it.
Musk has more failed/moronic ideas that there are models of teslas.
The problem with naming them is that then it becomes a discussion on whether the people I've named are impressive. Someone mentioned Einstein and was downvoted. Einstein is very obviously more interesting and accomplished in my mind than Elon, but he's one of many. Turing was 23 when he wrote his thesis on algorithmic computation. There are people with multiple turing awards out there.
If your yard stick is "rich person who made more money" yes, or "CEO who makes memes", or "is a celebrity", Elon is impressive relative to the general population. It's a sad, sad way to measure accomplishments, but sure.
Turing like a lot of pioneers is seriously overrated. When surrounded by low hanging fruit it’s easy to seemingly make a great deal of progress especially when your credited with formalizing existing ideas or making that one last step into usefulness.
Einstein actually pushed boundaries in a well established field which is vastly more impressive. Musk significantly pushing the boundaries in cars, rockets, computer networks, and banking is quite impressive in that context. We can quibble about PayPal, but I am being consistent in ignoring the charging network and self driving system etc as those are emerging fields. Clearly he’s not operating alone, but few people did.
Newton is perhaps the most obvious example of significant progress in independent and established fields and IMO far more impressive, but it’s really not a long list.
As for Musk's accomplishments, I don't find them to be very impressive or interesting.
Purely objectively, Musk is the second richest person on the planet to the possible exclusion of dictators. That in and of it’s self is rarified air. Winning the silver in say diving isn’t nearly as impressive simply because the is so much less competition. The Marathon is perhaps a closer analogy except that’s a more question of genetic gifts than pure grit.
Doing that and starting a single business like Bill Gates is a true accomplishment, but he’s done multiple independent and highly successful companies. That’s rarified air over the history of humanity.
You personally might not value such things, but that’s simply not an objective standard. Doing that and only making high speed low latency global internet available around the world would be enough on it’s own to be worth talking about. This isn’t a small thing a lot of people failed to tackle the exact same problem. Except Starlink alone isn’t what people think about which is a sign of just how much the guy got done.
Both of these companies have become the largest companies in their respective fields and can arguably be labeled the two most complex and highest barrier to entry industries. Sending humans into orbit has only been accomplished by large nation states, no company has even done that besides SpaceX. As for car manufacturing, it’s been over 50 years since a new competitor has entered, and only Ford and Tesla have never gone bankrupt.
To anyone trying to argue this isn’t the most accomplished human alive, give me a friggin break
financial accomplishments: Rockefeller, Getty, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Mellon, Walton, Kluge, Gates, Bezos, Buffett
industrial accomplishments: Ford, Edison, Gould, Morgan, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg, Branson, Allen
Lots of overlap on the lists, but I decided not to doubly-list individuals -- and the lists are by no means complete, I favored recent centuries.
That said, Musk is tremendously successful and awe-inspiring; this pissing contest is a miserable thing to participate in -- but I still think it's important to point out that Musk isn't the only awe-inspiring success ever.
I'll put it to you another way: if Tesla vanished tomorrow, life wouldn't really change. There may be a few brownouts in a corner of the planet as Tesla batteries vanish and power generators kick in, but life would largely be the same. EV adoption would continue sans Tesla just fine. Self-driving would probably even improve because there wouldn't be the risk of one greedy company, guinea-pigging people and ignoring laws for the sake of share price and potentially bringing the wraith of regulators on the sector.
If Amazon vanishes, Western civilization collapses. That's it. There'd be riots on the street. Critical infrastructure would cease to work for months. Entire supply chains would fall apart and billions of people would be impacted negatively. And it's not like the world would go on. It would take years for competitors to spin up the capacity to replace the void Amazon vanishing would cause in multiple industries.
And the beauty is that while Musk is clearly obsessed with Bezos, I don't think Bezos really thinks about Musk much at all. Just like we can tell that Musk checks the share price multiple times per day, but I suspect Bezos has no idea what Amazon's share price is at unless he's selling to fund other ventures. Also importantly, Bezos has set things up so when he dies, Amazon goes on just fine. If Musk dies, that's the end of Tesla.
Oh the guy who has poured billions of dollars into Blue Origin over 20+ years with little to show for it aside from failed legal attempts / overturned patents to attempt to hinder SpaceX, and a penis shaped sub-orbital rocket?