If it's deemed foolish, then either Elon is foolish and making a fool of himself, or there's a misinterpretation of the action. The success someone like Musk repeatedly attains in business cannot be achieved without a significant capacity for making wise, informed decisions, or strategic moves. If his track record is any indication, he'll probably have a successful venture, and I, for one, am fascinated to see the emotional attachment and arrogance the peanut gallery continues to spout. It's a curiosity to me why those who have little to no actual stake or insight seem to have the highest confidence and volume. Perhaps it's a selection bias.
PayPal. SpaceX. SolarCity. Tesla. Boring. Elon Musk has a signature characteristic of building 10x-ethos companies from first principles at great personal & financial risk.
It's the Muskian Cycle: Innovate, try to garner investment, be laughed out of the room, make it work anyways, laugh all the way to the top of tens of thousands of millions of dollars of net worth. Then stuff all the capital into the next Big Thing.
Steve Jobs said something like "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." As far as I can tell, each of Musk's successful ventures has inculcated iterative or multiplicative innovation into the fabric of technology, society, and interaction.
PayPal spearheaded and won the race for payment processing. It wasn't perfect, but it was in no small part due to Musk why the company succeeded and earned its eBay buyout.
SpaceX, with its obvious contributions to the fields of not only rocketry but every second-order industry around it, including testing/software, etc., has been a game-changer. Again, second-order, competition arises, humanity wins.
Ditto Tesla; not only the AI/ML/CV wizardry in the stack but plenty of other non-primary-field innovation and progress comes alongside (manufacturing, battery tech, etc.). I personally am not convinced EVs are some solution to the "climate problem," given the net-impact of mfg and power consumption, but it is a pre-requisite to self-sustainability that we move toward renewables, and with that optimism I move on.
I don't know a whole lot about the Solar operations at Tesla, but SpaceX + Starlink has made one of those incremental improvements in the internet access game. I've got my biggest gripe with this venture - based on Kessler Syndrome, I'm afraid of trashing our space-way by means of junk, though admittedly this fear comes from Stephenson's "Seveneves" and not facts or reality. Orbital tracking remains a significant challenge to the exploding private space industries.
Bringing us to the Boring Co. Literally nobody is complaining about that, but it's such a banal and useful and imperative tech to develop for the overall goal of Martian exploration, and it's not abstract - it exists and is doing what it needs to do.
Certainly 𝕏 (neé Twitter) and Xai are integral to Musk's overarching vision. For years, I've posited that someone should, or perhaps already has, been meticulously analyzing the entirety of Twitter's data. This data, rich in semantic analysis, interaction templating, linguistics, and more, could be instrumental in training and researching emergent systems. The rapid, mostly unfiltered, and bite-sized nature of the medium provides a unique lens into the human thought process, offering a potential approximation of how "thoughts" might interact.
It's possible we (humans) are destined to reclaim our collective consciousness through technology. It is also possible Elon is the anti-Christ, and we should be looking inward, meditating, and removing blockages to our lineage that has shrouded the collective consciousness, muted our heart and soul, and reduced us to a low level of being, what the Buddhists might consider Naraka.
There are a lot of FUD-spreaders about Neuralink, too, but listening to the technical discussions and grokking the science has me convinced they are approaching another sea change. There are hard engineering problems and there are impossible problems. Elon's companies take the hard ones and just work really hard, then get the solution. I see no reason why this approach to software platforms and dynamic interactivity interfaces would be any different.
People don't like change, and they love to complain about something. So I obviously understand why these > angry and disappointed types are out of the woodwork.
But the thing is, we should celebrate and adore the scientific progress, commitment to science & innovation over pure profit, and - in my opinion as a USA chap - dedication to as much free speech as possible.
Cringe, hate, love, whatever - the guy is objectively successful and objectively delivered on some cool shit. I wouldn't argue he is the most precise or accurate predictor, but he's quite the visionary. When the Starship gets to orbit, there'll be some more creative press and commentary, but I will be watching and as excited as when the Roadster Spaceman went to Mars. Or when I saw the first booster landings.
Everyone fails, we are defined by how hard we try.