Elon Musk: From electric cars to Mars [video]

This guy is one of the few actual living heroes, in my opinion.

The striking thing about Musk is that he's a visionary who can execute. In my experience these things are usually mutually exclusive. Inventors and visionaries are generally piss-poor at business, and businessmen usually don't have an imaginative bone in their bodies.

As for why these skills are mutually exclusive, I think that deserves a great deal of thought and study. Personally I fault the culture of both disciplines. Visionary/inventor culture comes from a sort of a countercultural root and is overtly hostile to business and marketing. Meanwhile, business and marketing tends to inculcate a kind of narcissism or even sociopathy that isolates these fields from everyone else, and to disparage the skills of others as mere "human resources." A businessman has no need to learn anything other than business-- he/she can just outsource the rest, right?

As a result, those who invent and those who execute are nearly always at complete odds with one another, with predictable results, and rarely are these abilities combined in the same person.

I think the thing that needs to die is the "my skills are the only skills that matter" narcissism. I've seen it in every discipline. Only engineering matters, only marketing matters, etc.

Elon Musk has a great and relaxed manner about him. I love how he is thinking big and didn't just take his fortune and retire to an island. Irrespective of what he does from now I think he can be an inspiration to anyone of trying to live their dreams. Not sure if I'm going to be unpopular saying this but the posts on HN about making a few thousand dollars a month (and there are certain people on here who are well known for this) are dwarfed by people like this who truly try to make a difference. I personally would rather talk about the next Apple, the next Microsoft, the next Ford than talk about split-testing my app and achieving $10k/month of sales.

It's certainly impressive how much Musk has accomplished in his life so far. I hope that he decides to pursue his electric jet (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/03/musk_plans_supercar_...). How amazing would it be to buy a jet for ~$1m, and have it cost basically nothing to operate? To be able to go to the airport, no security, hop in, and go across the country on a whim's notice?

"We might even see a flying car".

Sign me up! :-)