[edmcnulty101]

I would love an accounting of things that the universities have discovered that have trickled down to the public in the past century.

I'm still using essentially the same internal combustion vehicle, phone, and literally everything that I was using decades ago and more or less that my parents were using. My phone is a little better, that's about it.

What is this 150 billion of our tax dollars a year getting us?

A telescopic photograph of chorizo?

Elon Musk has moved the needle much more than all of the universities combined it seems like.

We just take for granted that giving money to science is a good investment. I've worked in university science labs and they're extremely inefficient, incompetent, and low labor. One view is that this money is scientific welfare.

[Test0129]

One might wonder where Elon gets his ideas from. Perhaps he's standing on the shoulders of thousands of man-years of research and development paid for by the American people. You may be surprised to learn how much R&D technology that takes telescopic photographs of chorizo ends up in your pocket as your phone, smartwatch, etc. Elon fetishism has no place in this argument. He's an end user of the system. I am not even sure how it can compare.

[edmcnulty101]

> One might wonder where Elon gets his ideas from.

Looking at Lithium Ion batteries it looks like the tech was developed at NASA and Exxon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery

[projectramo]

Whom does he hire to help build those cars, rockets and tunnels? Graduates of universities or Oompa Loompas?

[jacobr1]

To charitably read and steel-man the GP's comment, one could argue that while undergraduate education is fine - there are better patterns of research - such as industry (bell labs, spaceX, google ml research), or government (oak ridge, NASA center). That the mixed mission between doing research and teaching at the same time in a T1 research university doesn't work as well as more formally separating those functions.

I'm pretty sure I don't agree with the above ^, it probably discounts the value of grad-school research as an apprenticeship model amongst other drawbacks. But it does have some merit to bear consideration. Surely the current model isn't perfect - where could we improve?

[nineplay]

"Stanford Solar Car Project was ‘key’ to Tesla’s inception", says Tesla co-founder JB Straubel

https://electrek.co/2016/05/12/tesla-motors-stanford-solar-c...

[elteto]

The irony here is that you’d never be considered for an engineering position at any of his companies without an engineering degree AND a good GPA.

[jeffbee]

This is one of the most ignorant comments I’ve seen, and I weep for a future where people think that cramming flashlight batteries into cars is as big an achievement as eradicating polio, discovering the structure of dna, developing vaccines that prevent common cancers, creating the whole concept of open source software, or editing genes.

[edmcnulty101]

Your comment seems extremely ignorant. Wanting scientists to have accountability with our tax money seems like a valid ask.

> eradicating polio -> almost a century ago 1950s?

> discovering the structure of dna -> almost a century ago 1950s

> developing vaccines that prevent common cancers -> cancer is the second leading cause of death, this hasn't impacted the world significantly and isn't even a treatment except in extremely specific cases.

> creating the whole concept of open source software -> almost half century ago, not even academia, a consortium

> editing genes -> been around 15 years and would love some examples of how it impacted the world significantly pretty much at all

[jeffbee]

The first serial production of battery-electric cars was in 1906.

The HPV vaccine has already cut the rate of cervical cancers by more than 90% in the age groups that have benefitted from the vaccine. If you think savings the lives of thousands of young women is not an impact, you're just reinforcing my opinion of you.

[edmcnulty101]

Over a trillion dollars to save thousands of lives. I don't know if that's an ideal investment.

[adamsmith143]

>Elon Musk has moved the needle much more than all of the universities combined it seems like.

Well certainly most of his engineers he employees were educated, and this is shocking, at Universities.

Where do you think all the fundamental research into Aerodynamics, Materials Science, etc. happened that has made his company even feasible?

[hdhdhsjsbdh]

> Elon Musk has moved the needle much more than all of the universities combined it seems like.

This is incredibly narrow-sighted. How many of “Elon Musk’s” (really, the people he employs) achievements have been made possible by foundational scientific research funded by public grants and made available to the broader community? I would argue a nontrivial amount. Much of tech entrepreneurship is technology transfer, not foundational. These are all parts of a complex ecosystem and no one piece is solely responsible for moving the needle.

[jeffbee]

Nothing from any of Musk’s enterprises has been even slightly innovative, scientifically. He is an industrial technologist, which is fine, but it means he scales up known processes.

[chasd00]

I would argue the material science done that enabled the raptor and raptor2 rocket engine (the o2 side pre-burner specifically) was pretty innovative scientifically.