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Comment by bentlegen | Hacker News Reader

Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Google (made near-infinite knowledge reachable), Chrome/Chromium, GMail, YouTube, Android (powers billions of handsets), Google Maps …

If you credit Musk directly for all the aforementioned things, why not them? And yes, Google bought some of those properties, but so did Musk. What’s the difference? Marketing?

(I don’t actually think Larry and Sergey “most benefitted humanity” or deserve a bunch of humanitarian awards, but I’m curious why they’re not credited with Google’s achievements in the way Musk is with his companies.)

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I think there is a ‘but for’ aspect, without google it’s reasonable to expect the some other search engine could have evolved into the same thing. Given the scope and scale of the investment required to get Tesla and SpaceX to a viable state it seem that only a somewhat crazy person could would even attempt that. It’s difficult to find an optimum level of crazy, and is often difficult to distinguish between crazy and stupid. That said, I do think Elon would be even more successful if he was a bit less crazy and a bit less stupid.

By that logic, why couldn’t someone have done the same with electric cars and rockets? Were we never going to go into space again? Did the Nissan Leaf not already exist?

As I mentioned; they lacked the scale and scope required to be successful.

I disagree and here’s an example I would use.

In the 20+ years Google has dominated search, who has come along and iterated a “better” version? Bing? Is the capital and scope required not approachable, as you suggest?

Similarly, since Tesla helped demonstrate a valid market for electric cars, how many automakers have released competitive (and to some, better) EVs? If the capital requirements and scope were too large, where did Rivian and Polestar and numerous other upstarts come from?

I won’t disagree re: SpaceX.

That is first movers advantage that gives rise to a network effect which acts as a powerful moat for a natural monopoly. Another search company could have been google without the need of a crazy person. Which is to say a google like company was probability inevitable, if not google then something like it.

Google was not the first search engine, nor the 6th.

They were the first movers on a particular and very effective way of doing search.

Re SpaceX: it had massive government funds going for it. So surely, no one else could do it, because they don’t have the funds to lobby for taxpayer money that hard.

I still think we should have just given it to NASA, a private entity has no business in space.

Launching Google was a low stakes endeavour. Nobody was willing to put as much on the line as Musk did with SpaceX and Tesla. It's likely all of it would have happened at some point, but certainly not as quickly and effectively as it has thanks to Musk.

That's a good answer, although it's arguable their best contribution was in the prior century with search and page rank, whereas this century has been dominated with contributions to the ad space.

PageRank was developed in 1998. I assure you Google did not immediately come out and crush search. Altavista, Yahoo, and Lycos might have all been bigger properties during 1999.

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