500 billionaires in a country of 330 million people?

What do you think rare is, then?

I'd argue that wealth is step 1, but step 2 is a willingness to gamble that wealth, to lose it, and to hustle.

And of the billionaires I’ve met none would be willing to risk losing a comma no matter how big the potential payoff. In that respect Elon is definitely the 1% of the 1%.

Forbes (a website I despise) did a survey of people and how much they worried about money. As I recall even those with $3bn still worried about not having enough money. I'm not sure if that feeling is ingrained from evolving on the plains of Africa or if it's about losing status among your peers.

Wait, you've met multiple billionaires?

It helps when NASA is laying off everyone you need to hire, and they have no other choice of a place to work (unless they like blowing up poor kids in poor countries for Raytheon).

It should also be noted that he was not a founder at Tesla, even. He bought his way in.

>It helps when NASA is laying off everyone you need to hire, and they have no other choice of a place to work

Actually Musk has said in the past that they had a LOT of trouble hiring early on. They had goals of reusable rockets right around the start of the company, and most people in the industry didn't take them seriously.

Nobody wanted to work for the laughing stock of a company that dreamed of doing something that most thought was impossible (affordably reusing rocket stages).

People who pay astroturfers by the dozens might not be trustworthy sources of information.

He founded Tesla through force of will. They had a concept but no funding and no drivetrain. Elon got them funded and hooked them up with an engineer he had been funding to build a drivetrain. Their original roadster was going to cost $200,000+ just to build, Elon pushed them out of the way and saved the company.

He did not found Tesla.

If he hasn’t gotten involved, it would have failed. That’s indisputable. The common usage of founder nowadays doesn’t require someone was an employee on day 1, it means they were instrumental in its early days and Elon certainly was.

>There are over 500 billionaires in just the US alone. His wealth was an essential ingredient for sure, but it must be obvious that it takes more than wealth to create a company like SpaceX.

it's just that there are lots of low risks ways to make money with lots of capital than to risk wasting it on engineering or 'boundary-push' style business movements.

Big projects are cool, and great PR -- but safe trading and high interest accounts pay out more consistently, and often better.

It'd be nice to move the incentive over to value-building/engineering more than banking, though.