Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Google (made near-infinite knowledge reachable), Chrome/Chromium, GMail, YouTube, Android (powers billions of handsets), Google Maps …
If you credit Musk directly for all the aforementioned things, why not them? And yes, Google bought some of those properties, but so did Musk. What’s the difference? Marketing?
(I don’t actually think Larry and Sergey “most benefitted humanity” or deserve a bunch of humanitarian awards, but I’m curious why they’re not credited with Google’s achievements in the way Musk is with his companies.)
I think there is a ‘but for’ aspect, without google it’s reasonable to expect the some other search engine could have evolved into the same thing. Given the scope and scale of the investment required to get Tesla and SpaceX to a viable state it seem that only a somewhat crazy person could would even attempt that. It’s difficult to find an optimum level of crazy, and is often difficult to distinguish between crazy and stupid. That said, I do think Elon would be even more successful if he was a bit less crazy and a bit less stupid.
By that logic, why couldn’t someone have done the same with electric cars and rockets? Were we never going to go into space again? Did the Nissan Leaf not already exist?
Launching Google was a low stakes endeavour. Nobody was willing to put as much on the line as Musk did with SpaceX and Tesla. It's likely all of it would have happened at some point, but certainly not as quickly and effectively as it has thanks to Musk.
In the 20+ years Google has dominated search, who has come along and iterated a “better” version? Bing? Is the capital and scope required not approachable, as you suggest?
Similarly, since Tesla helped demonstrate a valid market for electric cars, how many automakers have released competitive (and to some, better) EVs? If the capital requirements and scope were too large, where did Rivian and Polestar and numerous other upstarts come from?
That is first movers advantage that gives rise to a network effect which acts as a powerful moat for a natural monopoly. Another search company could have been google without the need of a crazy person. Which is to say a google like company was probability inevitable, if not google then something like it.
Re SpaceX: it had massive government funds going for it. So surely, no one else could do it, because they don’t have the funds to lobby for taxpayer money that hard.
I still think we should have just given it to NASA, a private entity has no business in space.
That's a good answer, although it's arguable their best contribution was in the prior century with search and page rank, whereas this century has been dominated with contributions to the ad space.
PageRank was developed in 1998. I assure you Google did not immediately come out and crush search. Altavista, Yahoo, and Lycos might have all been bigger properties during 1999.
Heavy electric cars and rockets are making the biggest problems of this century worse.
We don't need more rockets or space tourism. And instead of building heavy EVs, Tesla should help the US build public transports. That is, if they want to help humanity.
Electric cars being heavier have an impact in that it causes more wear and tear on roads. But they're absolutely dwarfed by the wear semis cause.
Even when the electricity comes entirely from coal, electric vehicles are more efficient than ICE vehicles, so every EV deployed reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
> and rockets
Rockets impact on emissions is a rounding error on the global scale. The number of launched would have to increase by 1000 times to start approaching the airline industry, and with the move to methane fueled rockets it's possible to synthesize the fuel from CO2 in the atmosphere using carbon free energy, creating a closed loop.
> Tesla should help the US build public transports
It doesn't work like that. You can't just say "let's build more public transport" and it will magically happen tomorrow. There are a ton of barriers to expanding many forms of public transport, primarily public funding, which they do not control. And when it comes to thing like rail, that's compounded even more by right of way.
The fact of the matter is that the US is a car heavy society, and building EVs is the fastest way to reduce transport emissions without (ignoring incentives) directly having to rely on public funding.
As an added bonus, building up an EV production line allows you to relatively easily export them to other markets around the world. You can't export a rail line to another place.
> Electric cars being heavier have an impact in that
In that moving a heavier weight takes more energy. We don't need to slightly reduce our energy consumption, we need to drastically reduce it. Meaning that in any country that did not make the same mistake as the US (being to build their society around individual cars), heavy EV are clearly not enough. We need to use public transports, (e-)bikes, and small EVs for those who don't really have a choice. As far as I understand, a Tesla is basically a sports car. There is no place for sports cars where we are going. Of course I understand it is harder for the US, both because of culture (SUVs are the norm, right?) and infrastructure.
Still it's never too late to start building better infrastructures, I suppose.
> Even when the electricity comes entirely from coal, electric vehicles are more efficient than ICE vehicles
What do you mean by "more efficient"? That a Tesla produces less CO2 using electricity made from coal than a small ICE vehicle? How in the world did you get to that conclusion?
> so every EV deployed reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
It's more complicated than that. If you throw away a recent, small ICE vehicle in order to deploy an EV, I am pretty sure it doesn't reduce much. You have to consider the entire life of the vehicle (and seriously, coal?).
> The number of launched would have to increase by 1000 times to start approaching the airline industry
Which is the goal of SpaceX and every other company going in the space business, right?
> it's possible to synthesize the fuel from CO2 in the atmosphere using carbon free energy, creating a closed loop.
At scale, I very much doubt it remotely adds up. And all the carbon free energy you use to do that, you don't use it to replace fossil fuels elsewhere. It just doesn't work.
> It doesn't work like that. You can't just say "let's build more public transport" and it will magically happen tomorrow.
Fair enough. On the one hand you need less companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and more public investment into transport infrastructure.
> As an added bonus, building up an EV production line allows you to relatively easily export them to other markets around the world. You can't export a rail line to another place.
That is an interesting, US-centered approach. First, all the countries that have good public transports should just not import Teslas. Because those countries don't depend that much on cars, they can just improve their public transport infrastructures.
Maybe the US could learn a bit from those countries when they look into their public transports ;-).
What did he actually do with regards to electric cars and rockets, besides getting richer? I do give credit for being good at hyping up shit, less good at actually delivering that.
I would give him credit for pushing past the catch-22 in electric cars that people would not buy them until the charging infrastructure was there and the infrastructure was not going to be built up until there were more electric cars.
He was able to make the upfront investment in the charging infrastructure to get EV momentum going (Even thought it was probably largely other people's money involved). Legacy car makers might never have been capable of reaching that point, being tied to different profitability timelines.
Electric cars and rockets would not be where they are if he had chosen a different and much less difficult path.