>Thanks for this balanced take. I have quite a dislike for Elon (and alia), but I can sorta agree with your writing.

Thank you as well. I can certainly understand not liking some of his public stream of consciousness stuff. There is a definite impulsive streak there, and a bunch of other stuff that I'm not going to join the list of armchair psychoanalysts in going over but yeah. At the same time though I observe some odd group social effects that happens with regards to him and others like him, a "nails that stick up get hammered down" sort of thing. Comparing amount of press and dislike Musk has gotten in the West over the last decade and change he really entered the public consciousness vs, say, Putin up until a few months ago is enlightening. Or a host of other dictators/wannabes worldwide. Or fossil fuel CEOs and the like at American majors, whom I highly doubt most of the population can even name a single one of. Or CEOs/etc fighting rear guard actions against getting rid of lead or repairing infrastructure or a thousand other key things because it would be against their immediate personal financial interests. The world is full of rich folks who are not merely parasites but monsters, yet have a fraction of the virtual angst spilled over them vs Musk doing some silly thing on twitter. It's worth checking our impulses there I guess, what humans focus a lot on is definitely not always rational. Who irks us in some specific fashion or tugs our strings isn't necessarily the same as who smoothly and slowly slides knives in our collective backs, smiling self-deprecatingly and offering refreshments the whole time.

>One small thing though, even though funding startups was risky, I don’t believe it is entirely fair to reward this risk-seeking behavior as it is pure luck in a very significant percentage. Otherwise we should also congratulate lottery winners for their grand risk-taking behavior.

With apologies, but I don't agree fully with either part of this. First, while luck certainly played a role in Musk's trajectory, serious hard work, intelligence, vision and ability to gather around other even smarter people was critical too. Like much of HN I've been part of a few startups (zero home runs though some cool tech in one case), and doing one is never easy and most fail. Having lots of money to start can make some aspects easier but certainly not remotely a guarantee either as we can see from a stream of unicorn failures. There has to be some "there" there, real substance. And sometimes having lots of money to start can be outright poisonous if it means nobody ever feels any real pressure. For a direct SpaceX corollary consider the case of Blue Origin. Older than SpaceX. Has unlimited backing and has spent billions as well. Literally has never even once gotten something to orbit. Nothing. Not even an engine for somebody else's rocket. Bezos' backing may well in some ways have been a liability, it's allowed BO to act like a lazy unproductive Old Space company despite having zero revenue stream. They haven't needed to do the desperate hustle and focus that SpaceX did. They also didn't have an productively and intimately interested founder/leader. It shows.

Musk was key to making X.com and then the joining with PayPal work. And it can't be said those were just wasting money on something silly either, for all its massive disappointments the online payment thing was a big deal and fully viable as real business. It wasn't just luck. And even if it was, you're still being too blasé in your follow up analogy:

>Otherwise we should also congratulate lottery winners for their grand risk-taking behavior.

If someone won the lottery and then, rather then live on those winnings in luxury, turned around and sunk it all into two enormously capital intensive (orders of magnitude more than their winnings) ventures attempting to completely disrupt THREE entirely different massively entrenched global government/megacorp industries (orbital spaceflight, mechanized land transport, and the whole fossil fuel industry) to the benefit of all humanity with things along the way like creating a new player in the global information network industry that specifically was tuned to serve the most left behind, and then succeeded? Yes we can congratulate said lottery winner at that point right?

So Tesla and SpaceX were in no way "luck in a very significant percentage". There were very fundamental strengths there and huge holes being ignored. There was risk in how it would all come together, but the engineering was very good, Musk was deeply involved in that according to those on the ground floor, and they weren't trying to do something physically impossible at all. The vision and guts to see that through, the risk to go up against established lobbying to do it, even the hustle to get others to buy into it, is all a worthy accomplishment. There isn't any need to put any asterisks next to that just because he also says stupid shit or does silly things as well. Not even dangerously stupid things like his dumb stubborn insistence on doing autonomous driving with just cameras (because 'that's what humans do'). If he died tomorrow he still would have played a major role in seriously changing the world for the better.