[annabellish]

>He is under attack. For tweeting the wrong thing, for not making enough cars, for appearing unstable. Some of the criticisms have merit. Much of it is myopic and small-brained, from sideline observers gleefully salivating at the opportunity to take him down a peg. But what have these stock analysts and pontificators done for humanity?

Yeesh, what an opening paragraph. This, and the rest of the articles, seem to focus on the idea that Elon Musk isn't just a slightly more philantropic than average billionaire with a very good PR department, albeit one he's doing his best to undo the work of.

As one of the articles rightly states, Musk provided some funding for these projects, but is at best one person among tens of thousands actually responsible for _any_ of the achievements of "his" companies - scare quotes intentional, for between the loans and government grants it starts to become unclear what, other than the cult of personality which evidently no longer serves the needs of relatively mature and legitimate enterprises, he actually brings to the table here, beyond being an ideas guy who can afford to throw money behind getting external funding to try things.

Whether he deserves the shit he gets talked about him is a matter for debate, but it's very much a reaction against nonsense like one of the articles here comparing him to Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark, two comic-book superheroes defined by superhuman brilliance and superhuman finances, while Musk clearly can have only one of those things.

At the end of the day, though - do we need articles defending a man with a net worth of twenty billion dollars from the average citizen--who's net worth is closer to twenty _thousand_ dollars--'s criticisms? No, we don't. Whatever criticisms might be had, they're clearly not stopping him from doing whatever he likes.

[gfodor]

If you remove Elon Musk from the story, does SpaceX exist? Tesla? Do we still have self-landing, re-usable rockets? Are car companies still rushing to build electric vehicles in 2018?

[annabellish]

The individual companies likely not, but it's not like those are the only companies doing these things. Human achievements come from standing on the shoulders of giants, not from individual supermen - we see this through history time and time again, with so many groundbreaking discoveries being independantly made at about the same time simply because previous discoveries had made them possible.

This is not to diminish the minds of those who discovered them, of course, but it is to _temper_ the hero worship. What SpaceX is doing is not enabled by an individual superman, as the comparison with Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark would suggest, but by allocating resources to something made possible by the work of hundreds of thousands of people.

Remove one man from the picture there and that work still exists. Just as other companies are doing the same things _now_, because they are possible _now_, they would be with any individual person removed, regardless of who that person was. The details would be different - without Musk, it would be some other company doing this, without the lead designer, the things themselves would look different, without the lead engineer some components would make different tradeoffs, et cetera - but without Elon Musk, everyone working at SpaceX would still exist, everyone working at Tesla would still exist, and everyone working at other companies doing the exact same things would still exist. We could be a little behind, for sure, the hero worship could well have translated into inspiration for some, or even a lot of, people, but that doesn't make the man himself necessary for any of those things.

I worry that saying things like this comes across as attacking the man, which it absolutely isn't. Without Einstein, we would still have made the same realisations, collectively, eventually. Other people were working on the same things at the same time. Without Edison, we would still have the electric lightbulb, entirely likely invented by, hm, who...

Oh right, Tesla. The company itself is named after one of the most blatant examples of this phenomenon. Musk may even understand - he certainly does, he's clearly not dumb - that he isn't a unique superman. That doesn't make him "bad", but it does mean that we really don't need to waste thousands of words on defending his obviously harmful actions under the theory of "we have to let him do and say bad things or he might stop doing good things too."

[gfodor]

You wrote a lot but I think you answered my question: "we could be a little behind."

I'd argue that we would likely be a lot behind. Advancements don't just "happen." Progress can be lost, windows of opportunity can be closed, and risk can be avoided. I'd argue there's a good chance we'd have never gotten re-usable rockets if it wasn't for Musk's (at the time, foolish) risk taking with his personal funds to keep SpaceX solvent. Everyone at the time said it couldn't be done, if you recall, and in that kind of world, nobody is "doing the work." It's just considered not worth working on. It's out of mind. People allocate resources and time elsewhere. It's too risky anyway. We're in a period of relative peace that may or may not last. So there's a good chance no, we may have never gotten re-usable rockets, if the odds of a risk-taker coming along and giving it a shot comes along one or twice every couple of generations.

Our current space program regressing so far is evidence enough that willpower and human decision-making, not just waiting for people to "do the work", constitute a large part of what causes progress to happen.

And if we ever get to Mars, I'll argue it's even more likely that we would have never gotten to Mars without that risk taking. And who knows what potential futures unlock for humanity if that ever happens that can be traced back to Musk's decisions.

Being thankful that people like Musk are out there taking huge personal risks to advance human progress isn't "hero worship", and it doesn't disparage the work of the thousands of people who have helped achieve the goals. You are arguing with strawmen.

[adamrezich]

>At the end of the day, though - do we need articles [...]? No, we don't.

Who's "we" and who are you to state that articles should or should not have been written? I don't understand this mindset. I understand disagreeing with the thesis of a piece of writing but I don't understand the notion that a piece of writing "didn't need to have been written."