I feel shame when I meet them, but they do exist. And the rest of us shouldn't get a pass because we suck.
You haven't seen them at their very worst, in the moments where they did the things that haunt them for decades.
That's the point here - some people do less nasty stuff than others, but all of us have treated others horribly at some point.
"Pieces of shit" may not be the best phrasing. I'd say "When you meet a person, no matter what they seem like, you can be highly confident that they have done something wonderful for someone at some point, and that they have mistreated someone horribly at some point."
And can't you just accept that some people are good?
Everything people do is out of some sort of greed. Some of it results in good deeds others not so much.
You volunteer or donate to charity because it makes you feel good, boosts your ego, and/or inflates your sense of self worth but you ARE being helpful in the grand scheme of things.
If you're consistently doing good for reasons which are in no way indistinguishable for pure goodness, to me it's the same. Call it "boosting your ego" or "inflating your sense of self worth". Some people just feel good knowing they've helped other people. I don't see how these people can be considered "shit".
Mr Musk deserves credit for running with the idea despite incredulity, but it wasn't due to his vision.
From this, Elon founded spacex thinking he will build the rockets himself. A founding tenet of spacex was to decrease the cost of access to space. To achieve this, they set about trying to reuse rockets in the very the beginning. Their first rocket, the falcon 1, had parachutes on board to test first stage reusability. Later, on the first 2 launches of their falcon 9 rocket they again tried using parachutes. It became apparent that using parachutes wasn’t working and so, in 2011, they began the grasshopper program to practice their rockets propulsively. Within 4 years from the start of the program, spacex was successful and had landed a first stage from a rocket launching a payload
To suggest it wasn’t part of the original inception of spacex or it was just an off the cuff response is blatant exaggeration. Listen, Elon has quite a few problems and in my opinion he should not be in charge of the day to day management of his companies. He should be the ideas man, pushing the companies vision and letting others get bogged down in implementing his ideas.
If Musk isn’t actually pushing the buttons at Tesla then the magic is gone.
But of all the pieces of shit we have talked about, none of them are creating companies which can vertically land 70m by 3.7m rocket boosters from orbit. Compared to utility of Musk's initiatives to the society, he is actually a pretty nice person. Heck he is okay even in normal standards. Please consider the contents of both scales and judge responsibly.