Comment by JDGM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JDGM | Hacker News Reader

I assume that we're taking Elon Musk's "Tony Stark"-ness in this context to mean electric cars, space travel, and solar power. To the best of my knowledge he is neither an alcoholic nor a superhero, though I did just look up his marital history on Wikipedia and with assistance from Google Images I have to award 8 Tony Starks out of 10 on that one.

In all seriousness though, are we sure not one of those other 1,225 billionaires is "pursuing major advances in technology with a childlike wonder about the world’s potential"? When I hear about Elon Musk I tend to draw a different conclusion from the author of this piece: not that he is one of a kind, but that there are many more like him out there. I'm not sure which of us is right, quite possibly the author and not me - sometimes seeing X suggests 'generally ¬X' (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/03/when-seeing-x-suggests...).

Could you elaborate on how Katja's idea in the OB post might be used here? To me, it seems like it supports the OP (quite nicely, actually). In particular, Elon Musk shows that Tony-Stark-ness (as you've correctly defined it) is pretty darn visible. If there were more Tony Stark's out there, I'm now more likely to expect expect that I would have heard about them in the same way I've heard about Musk. This increases my confidence that there are not many Tony Starks compared to my pre-Musk assessment.

And then, of course, the question is: with so many billionaires out there, why?

"Could you elaborate on how Katja's idea in the OB post might be used here?"

Exactly in the way you describe. I was indeed using it to support the OP and not myself: "I'm not sure which of us is right, quite possibly the author and not me - LINK".

Ahh, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.

Do you really think there are a bunch of Elon Musk's out there who, say, just aren't doing as much self-promotion?

I don't know. It was one of those comments that started as one thing and by the end I'd basically persuaded myself of quite the opposite. The turning point I think was getting used to the idea of <1500 worldwide billionaires. For some reason I thought there were a lot more than that. I suppose I imagined them all hanging out together, puffing on cigars and saying things like "that Elon eh - what happened to just saving the planet without being on the front page of Hacker News every day?".

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