This is some serious revisionist history right here.

No one was talking about technically possible. We're not discussing space elevators.

The key point is combining economic feasibility with the prevailing cultural will.

Of course electric cars exist. GM made a bunch of them in the 90s and literally forcibly recalled them and crushed them into tiny cubes in front of their owners. They held a candle light vigil. The documentary about this is what inspired Musk to get involved with Tesla in the first place. There was clearly passionate market demand that was being suffocated and purposefully ignored by bloated incumbents who couldn't see anything past their bottom line and they lost track of the market.

Americans are sick of excuses for space travel. The USA is made entirely out of a culture of optimism and all the aerospace companies have nothing to show for meaningful progress as they collect their massive government checks. SpaceX is the first group to ever over promise and then also over deliver. They don't give excuses, they get results.

There is hype because these are the first companies since the post war utopia that are actually making things again that are fundamentally changing our transportation reality with technology.

So you are saying that before Tesla EVs were not a thing. They were, already during the early day of automobiles. Funny how better electric motors enabled ICE cars and killed EVs.

Before SpaceX, humanity travelled to the moon, shot probes out of the solar system, landed on other planets and moons. We got multiple space stations into orbit. We didn't have reusable rockets so.

And aerospace companies did, in fact, change transportation fundamentally post WWII. Jet engines, passenger jets, the 747, ever decreasing fuel consumption per passenger, ever quieter aircraft.

And the parent was talking about technical impossible. Which clearly it isn't. Never argued against incumbents being unwilling to do certain things. But please stop putting Musk, and people in general, on podests like that.

> What exactly did his companies deliver, that experts said was impossible, in the technological sense I mean?

Landing the Falcon 9 booster on a droneship. As a physicist, I never believed it was impossible (the bar for “impossible” is rather high in physics) and yet an expert in the field told me it was!

I mean, people had demonstrated VTOL rocket landings before SpaceX came along. It was obviously just a matter of scaling it up and throwing tons of engineering man hours and test money at it, as SpaceX did.

Oh, absolutely. And yet... the consensus among most of the oldguard was that that approach wouldn't work. Many in the industry thought that reuse had effectively failed due to the lessons of Shuttle and the real future lie in expendables. Additionally, the old guard at NASA that WERE into reuse were generally for single-stage, horizontal landing architectures. In the specific case of the GNC specialist that told me it was impossible, he actually said this AFTER SpaceX had proved Falcon 9 VTVL on land! He thought the relative motion of the droneship would make the landing effectively impossible... I disagreed.

The phrase "hindsight is 2020" applies to Elon's accomplishments in spades... anything he hasn't achieved yet is an "obvious con" and "impossible" while past achievements were "merely a matter of throwing engineers at the problem"...

One of the reasons nobody tries seriously before was economics. They came to the conclusion that it was simply cheaper to not reuse boosters due to the overall low number of launches. And whether that is true or not cannot be evaluated without SpaceX results being published.

First flight: 1993

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

100 $ / kWh battery packs. Or the range of the Semi, deemed 'physically impossible' by a Daimler exec. Let's see how that goes.

Musk's whole point is this: much more things are technologically feasible, but most people / companies limit themselves within apparent constraints.

As mentioned: he's a physicist. From a physics standpoint, only a small amount of things are actually impossible. Only the deepest fundamentals give rise to constraints, and only those are the constraints he accepts. Everything else is debatable. At least. Sure, money so that he can throw army of talented engineers at problems helps. But it's his whole point! If it's your goal and it's possible in principle, reach for it.

Be it batteries, reusable rockets, autopilot.

That's why he says that it's possible in principle to achieve level 5 autonomy without lidar (having worked with lidar as chief engineer at SpaceX) and that it's possible in principle to do brain-machine-brain communication of language or complex ideas within a decade.

It might not work eventually. If so, it might be very well delayed for years.

But there is a reason that ppl like Thiel or Palihapitiya say: never bet against Elon.

Imagine Tesla actually rolling out level 5 autonomy within a year or two...

We are waiting for Level 5 for way longer than 2 years by now. And you don't have to pull the physical impossible argument. EVs were among the first cars built 100 years ago. Reusable boosters were deemed possible but not economic by EASA before SpaceX talked about them.

Musk is constantly moving the goal post, so when he ultimately delivers something one day, people tend to forget how often he didn't deliver in the past. He seems to be the only one to get away with that.