What's his vision though? (This isn't me being naive - it's more of me asking the reader of these comments to contemplate this)

Basically Bioshock's Rapture, but on Mars.

And to have enough candidates for that, he's doing his best to make life on Earth as bad as possible for as many people as possible as fast as possible?

Now he looks like a cross between film and book versions of Hugo Drax, or like Joiler Veppers from Surface Detail.

But — despite all the things that should've (but didn't) set alarm bells ringing in my head at the time — until just after he bought Twitter and immediately starting making harmful decisions with its new rules, the output of his companies looked kinda like it was helping improve the world.

With SpaceX, humanity was finally unlocking that cheap spaceflight the Space Shuttle promised but didn't deliver ever since Rockwell started building the Enterprise-née-Constitution in 1974, which is one of the few areas where their work is still going great.

(Buuuut even then, for Mars missions to be viable they must have a working Sabatier plant that fits in the payload bay and can produce 330 tons of methane every 2 years from a Martian atmosphere and irradiance level, and I've not seen any sign of this actually getting worked on by any Musk-group company; such machines would be really useful for Earth's environment, and it's a requirement for his Mars plans as otherwise the Starship vehicles can't return to Earth).

With Hyperloop we were finally getting high speed transit to compete with polluting flights, but TBC has completely failed to do anything noteworthy, not even when it is news-worthy.

With Tesla, we were finally getting non-polluting cars, when the competition was hydrogen vapourware, milk-floats, an excuse for ongoing corn subsidies, and the occasional slow news day when some back-yard inventor made a car that was propelled by springs and/or hamsters.

Musk's vision is a big picture of himself.

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.

I agree about everything else, but I'm not sure about this:

> 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.

Could we have actually built an affordable commuter EV a decade earlier?

Eyeballing this graph, batteries were about 6x more expensive a decade before Tesla actually started delivering the Roadster: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

OTOH, perhaps the extra demand would just have made prices fall sooner, given the other graph in the link shows the relationship between market size and price, rather than year of price…

Conversely, it's remarkable to me that people still admire Elon Musk. It's perfectly acceptable to acknowledge his past accomplishment while accepting now that he appears to be suffering from drug abuse related and mental health issues.

In my view, Elon's spent most of his good will reputation capital. Of course, we still do have the super-fans who are willing to look past his petulant behavior and give him a pass for his bone-head business moves.

The other take is that he's a genius and a hostile takeover of Twitter was just a checkpoint on the way to making US government his puppet state. Congress is twiddling their thumbs while Musk is apparently preparing to siphon off taxpayer dollars into Space X, Tesla or other ventures.

Either way, it's bad. I loathe the man and fear what could happen.

My feeling on Musk is kinda like... there's this rock star I liked and damn the man could play, but then he ended a concert by stumbling onto stage covered in vomit, misses half his shows now with a syringe hanging out of his arm, and got arrested for domestic violence against his wife.

It's sad, but damn the man could play... once... I guess I can listen to the old albums.

It's like that.

Unfortunately rock stars on the spiral don't generally destroy democracy.

But it is emphatically not like that, because Musk fans aren't saying he should keep doing what he's good at: Telling SpaceX to shoot for the moon and feeding them cash

Musk fans keep insisting he should get more and more control of my life as an individual who has no interest in buying his products or using his businesses because they aren't good products for me.

They keep insisting that I AM WRONG for being upset about an outright asshole forcing himself into my life.

I don't dispute Musk's success as a manager - the problem is that, to achieve his vision, he turned each of his companies into dictatorships. That's fine (at least in the US), because you can choose not to work for him. But I don't think it's fine to run the entire US like Musk's (and Trump's) companies are run. As they say, Hitler contributed a lot to technical progress, built great Autobahns, and his scientists later assisted both the US and the USSR in the space race and in other fields - does that mean it's good Hitler was in charge of Germany? I don't think so..

That's what I'm getting at.

Why do we need this to advance?

We had everything we needed to build the Falcon 9 in 1985.

We will keep suffering Hitlers until we can build the Autobahn without him.

If we look at every other category of major innovation for the last century, are they all kicked off by a world-class narcissistic asshole?

Many yes, but certainly nowhere near all. So that would seem to invalidate your hypothesis.

Everyone connected to spacex via brain implant with him in control - i.e. the borg.

If the guy has demonstrated anything, it's that he wants total control.