| I find it odd to completely disavow someone because you don’t agree 100% with their politics. I mean Werner Von Braun was a Nazi party member and knowingly used slave labor. Doesn’t make his rocketry advancements any less impressive. Or Charles Darwin’s views of superior races. Or Gandhi’s gray area views of pedophilia. I mean if you’re going to discounted every person with a view you find distasteful your list of people you admire is going to be blank. You may find Musk’s views distasteful but he’s had an enormous impact on EV’s, rocketry, hell space in general. I think it’s pretty awesome. |
This doesn't mean I can't admire NASA, that I have to dismiss the Hoover Dam, that I think every act by Obama or Bush was heinous.
Likewise, I can look at Falcon 9/Heavy, at the progress with Starship, and applaud.
But.
His "Paint is Black" video, and what he claimed about it, was a lie. He himself is pretty awful, and already fits amongst the others you list given the revealed preferences shown by Grok, and by his reactions to criticism of Grok's behaviour.
The bonus-target market-cap of 8 trillion only makes sense with a very optimistic view of the AI Tesla's developing for both FSD and Optimus, and by "very optimistic" I mean "FSD turns them into a monopoly supplier of cars worldwide; or both FSD and Optimus together displace a significant fraction of the US low-skill jobs market while also getting a monopoly on industrial robots and a monopoly on cars in just the USA". It's the kind of thing I expect we'll be putting into history lessons next to Enron and Dutch Tulips, with laws passed to prevent whatever investigators find out to be the key mechanism behind it.
Even with SpaceX, it's impressive, but not because it actually hits Musk's goals, rather because everyone else in space is "over optimistic" about their schedules even harder than Telsa is.