I don't like Musk's recent actions or the awful political ideas he's been pushing either, but it's remarkable that people can't see why he's admired by so many people.

This sort of blindness is a major reason liberals can't properly respond to the rise of MAGA or Trumpism. They refuse to understand it. Understanding something doesn't mean you agree. You can't properly criticize something you don't understand, nor can you provide an alternative that answers it.

Go back in time to the 1990s and 2000s.

The shuttle program was winding down. The only way to get humans into space currently on the market was the Russian Soyuz program, which is ancient Soviet technology. The only human habitation in space was the ISS, which everyone knows is a good engineering experimental platform but otherwise a dead end. The DC-X (first vertical landing rocket) was cancelled. The Venturestar was cancelled, and it may not have been a good design anyway for several reasons.

A lot of people are writing about this as the end of the space age, that the whole thing wasn't a good idea to begin with and there is no future there.

Then along comes SpaceX and within a few years they go from small orbital rocket to functional first stages that land themselves and now they almost have a fully reusable super-heavy capable of refueling in orbit.

Now look at cars. Common wisdom in the 1990s and 2000s is that affordable long-range cars are impossible without fossil fuels. There's a popular site called The Oil Drum that pushes the narrative that all motorized transport will end if fossil fuels are depleted. There are hybrids, but they still run on gas, and nothing much has happened to ICE technology since fuel injection in the early 1980s.

There are some EV efforts but they're early and half-assed.

Then along comes Tesla with the roadster and shows that EVs can be not just viable but cool and actually faster with better torque and acceleration than conventional cars. Since then many other car companies have caught up, but I still believe the whole industry would not have moved without Tesla kicking them in the arse.

If you really hate Musk, the question you should be asking is: why does the human race seem to need people like this to advance?

We had the technology to build the Falcon 9 and Starship in the 1990s, maybe even the 1980s. The problem wasn't money. The total cost of Falcon 9 development was comparable to two space shuttle launches.

The situation wasn't as absurd with EVs, but we definitely could have built a commuter EV at least a decade before we did. Look into the GM EV1 from the 1990s, which pre-dated the Nissan LEAF -- the first mass market EV, which did beat Tesla on that front -- and it had similar range and performance. The EV1 was killed in spite of demand becuase the conventional auto industry hated EVs. Some still do, like Toyota.

It really does seem like nothing big happens in human history without some manic unhinged asshole pushing it. We have everything -- ability, intelligence, technology, money -- but we don't do it without one of these people. Why?

Maybe we'd need "visionary" CEOs less if we had an over the counter amphetamine-like drug but with less addictiveness or other side effects.