Elon Musk will get turned into art and will be the main thing remembered from this time. He's going to succeed in building his city on Mars, and multiplanetary life will be the basic reality of people in 500 years. They'll wonder how their reality started, and it'll be perfectly clear it was Elon and his singular genius.

Elon is such a weird person that it's ridiculously easy to turn him into a character in a story, which people do all the time already, right now, with great abandon, even though Elon's a contemporary figure where you can go to one of his talks and see him in person if you want. People in 500 years will have fully turned him into a fantasy hero out of stories, especially if he dies in some way that will complete the pattern in people's heads of the self-sacrificing powerful slave (really really hope that doesn't happen to him).

Lots of his talks are up on Youtube, and he's amazingly transparent, he puts it right out there what he's doing and then delivers mind-bending tech. The Tesla Battery Day presentation in 2020 blew my freakin' mind, stuff like rearrangement of basic industrial processes like nickel refining, or the laser focus on scalability, capital requirements, speed, automation, the correctly-chosen goal of reaching a scale that can alter climate change.

Then people immediately make enormously confident statements about him that are the opposite of true, because they ignorantly think he's a joke because he's such a weird guy plus an actual well-meaning person.

I've never spotted Elon Musk telling a lie, and the stuff he says is consistently seriously insightful and on-point. In fact Elon seems to me to be the only person on Earth who's acting fully rationally. The stuff he does makes sense _all the way down_, where somebody like Barack was acting very rationally but was hemmed-in by the nature of his position as president, where his power to do the right thing was constrained by e.g. the Senate. Elon consistently goes along doing the right thing, not "the right thing" in the usual sense where the person's doing the best they can considering their circumstances, but objectively The Right Thing.

I had never seen or heard tell of anything like Elon Musk before I started noticing him in about 2014, and I'm 50, well-read, traveled, overeducated, keep a sharp eye on current events, try all the time to understand the world around me. I bitterly regret not going down to Texas for the Starship presentation in 2019. Turned out it was de facto open to the public because Boca Chica Village residents could come. It would've been awesome to be there on that windy night on the coast of Texas, with a small group of people listening to Elon, with a mockup Starship right behind him, and Tim Dodd got a cool little interview afterward. Fortunately it's all up on Youtube; but I prefer to go be at historic events in person whenever possible.

It's an interesting art to spot important things unfolding and get there in time, a real-world substantive sport. Predicting what art will be remembered in 500 years is interesting; judging what art from the past was significant is interesting; but judging reality in realtime well enough to show up yourself in person in time to be in on a historic event, to meet a person who is right now doing the significant thing, that I would say is the most interesting of all. Short of, of course, _being_ the person doing the historically-significant thing.