I was talking about Musk in Tesla. And given Tesla trajectory since 2008, its clearly not a failure even if the most recent year wasn't as good as some before.

I have no idea what 'abuse of marketing is', seems like a you thing.

Non of Musk companies have been credibly accused of anti-trust. Not sure where you are getting that.

If your theory of 'marketing above everything' was even remotely true the world would look very differently. There isn't a single credible economic, business or management book that claims that everything can be overcome by marketing. The list of companies you provide is just selection bias.

I never claimed he doesn't have short comings, I seems you are moving the goal posts. I can talk all day long about his short comings, many are not actually often talked about by people who are incredibly critical of Musk and just repeat a bunch of twitter talking points that have been repeated for the last 10 years.

There is a difference between being rationally critical and outright denying agency or basic competence. Most of the time people can't even make their mind up if he is incredibly evolved and responsible for all bad decisions (but not good ones) or if he isn't involved at all and just drops money on people. Pointing how how he or his companies are not perfect is simple, and not interesting. Actually using comparative measures between him and his companies with actual relevant comparison companies make a lot more sense. But if they did that a lot of the criticism would sound very different. The fact is, because Musk is unpopular, people use different standard on him and his company then they do for many others. Musk is seen as a person, while the comparable companies like GM or Lockheed Martin aren't, they are just faceless cooperate blobs no matter that many of their owners are billionaires as well. Its much harder for people to summon the same kind of passion about those kinds of companies. When objectively they are far, far, far, far worse in basically ever way imaginable.

Musk companies are evil and we must hate him and take ever opportunity to point that out, because his evil companies use deceptive marketing. Lockheed Martin was a significant part of lying the US into the Iraq war and they are wasting billions of tax payer $ but somehow people can't summon 1/1000 the amount of effort on that.

And about your 'get involved', I seriously don't understand what that even means in this context. Go work at a space company? Found a space startup? Get a job at SpaceX? How does 'getting involved' get you any actual information on these topics? I guess I could get a job at Airbus, SpaceX is out, but not sure I want to work there.

Or do you mean in the context of 'space isn't relevant' (again just factually wrong) and I should go out and protest climate change or something? I really don't get it.

But whatever it was, frankly, that just sounds incredibly, fucking arrogant. Like you are divine being floating over the rest of us lowly plebs who get their information from 'the internet' unlike you, who gets all the information from 'the real world'.

The fact is this, on Youtube there are interviews (congressional hearings and so on) that are first hand sources on these topic. If you choose to ignore first hand sources and witness testimony because you are out there in the 'real-world' doing gods work, saving babies from burning buildings, or whatever it is you do when you are 'involved'. And you don't want to sit at home and read books, written by people who spend 100s of hours involved in a topic, that's fine. But don't tell other people their facts are wrong or that you know better because you are 'involved'.