[nonesuchluck]

2006: There is a reason Gustave Trouvé invented the electric car 125 years ago and it never took off.

2011: There is a reason Bell invented VTVL rockets 50 years ago and it never took off (lol).

Musk's _entire deal_ is taking well-known inventions that he thinks haven't received adequate investment, and building great engineering teams to commercialize them. They're not all good ideas (I would argue Hyperloop isn't--but it's irrelevant). But "never took off [before]" is an exceptionally poor argument against Elon.

[sudosysgen]

That's just a list of bad analogies. The electric car did take off 125 years ago. It just slowly lost out because of the ICE, and now the advantage swung back.

Vertical landing rockets did take off. The issue is that they were all manned for obvious reasons. Then IT advanced and now you don't need a person inside to land them. NASA and McDonnell Douglas realized this and it led to the DC-X program : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X , which demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that vertical landing and takeoff was doable, and it did so at a price that was lower than the financing SpaceX needed for Grasshopper. However the NASA budget was constantly being cut, and they had to chose between the VentureStar (which has military use) and the DC-X, and they chose the DC-X. It was absolutely clear to everyone at the time that vertically landing a rocket multiple time was completely feasible. What really happened is that NASA did it faster, better, and cheaper than Elon Musk ever could, but NASA is not allowed to operate commercially and US politicians only care about financing programs that are useful for defence or for votes. It's a question of ideology that made SpaceX useful.

No one thought that landing a rocket vertically multiple times was impossible. People just thought that Elon couldn't do it. And indeed it took him a lot more resources to do it than NASA - the DC-X took 100 million dollars and 2 years, while SpaceX took 7 years and 500 million dollars to fly their first VTVL (Grasshopper, time from first receiving outside investment)

Vacuum trains of any appreciable use were never, ever built. And not only that, but there is no comparable Li-ion or automated flight computer to make them worthwhile. Those two examples are horrible analogies.

Elon Musk never took a technology that was never built before and made it work. He only ever took existing technologies and leveraged technological advances to make them more viable, which is a good thing. But he never made a technology work that never worked before. Ever. He simply doesn't have the resources to do the fundamental engineering necessary for that, nor the good judgement to know where to focus these high-risk low-reward efforts.

[nonesuchluck]

Nothing you wrote contradicts anything I said, because I did not claim Tesla or SpaceX invented anything brand new. I said they built existing inventions into viable products and brought them to market. They were each great ideas whose time had clearly come, and yet, no one was building them.

The examples I picked were historical inventions which were actually built by Trouvé and Bell, not merely conceptualized or patented. And we spent decades whining about GM killing the electric car blah blah, when all we needed was somebody to come along and actually do the heavy lifting.

To me, Elon Musk is the antithesis, rather than fulfillment, of the great man theory of history. In each case, somebody else would have gotten around to it, eventually, because the ideas were ripe. And yet, time and again, it's Musk there at the finish line, not somebody else.

And yeah, hyperloop-style systems have been built. That's the point. I don't think that's an idea worth stealing, but Elon does, and Elon has the $billions and the engineers to push it forward, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[sudosysgen]

An operational vacuum train has never been built. Operational vertical launch vertical landing rockets were built. Operational electric cars were built. Elon never built something no one built before.

Elon didn't even make Tesla ffs. He's not the one that decided to do something about GM killing the electric car and got the ball rolling. He was an investor.