I'm not an Elon fanboy, it's just a little bizarre to me that people mark this guy up as a crazy liar who shouldn't be taken seriously, meanwhile many of his bold claims have actually resulted in advancing tech and science in staggering ways. Like, people were saying the same thing about his claim to land first stage boosters, and here we are.

Side note, apparently he is still actively selling off all his possessions.

F9 is also incredible and has made the impossible possible... and Starlink is one instance of that, which also exists and is usable.

You can't really highlight his failures without also giving credit where credit is due to his (and his organizations') successes.

I'm really curious how he gets such smart and talented people to work at his companies.

Meanwhile, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have made numerous successful and commercial launches and landings.

Also consider that it took NASA about 9 years to fully develop the Space Shuttle from ground up and they didn't lose a single vehicle during testing - 50 years ago!

This is not accurate: reusable orbital first stages is a SpaceX first, and the cost savings it yielded enabled Starlink, which is another SpaceX first (high speed, low-latency, low-altitude LEO satellite internet).

[1] https://youtu.be/JzXcTFfV3Ls

And how is it questionable? They've got the cheapest (for their class) launch prices in the world.

Elon says stupid things sometimes, but I would rather have most of the time, than more stupid manager talk from our German companies with their 'electrified intelligence' and AI in our dashboards (because they bind a GPS coordinate to a setting like Tesla).

Anyway, I really just wanted to point out that 50 years ago it was apparently possible to develop spaceships in less time without a "move fast and break things" approach.

Of course, so has every famous idiot.

That describes every user on this website...

Elon Musk is demonstrably very good at some things - in particular running companies. I can't think of any other person who has successfully started multiple billion dollar companies. Which isn't to say that they don't exist, but... (see next paragraph)

Elon Musk is also much more willing to speak his mind than most successful entrepreneurs (which is why you hear about him). Sometimes he is rather stupid (see paragraph 1), sometimes he is not. Often I think his statements (and to a large extent probably his actual opinions as well) are biased towards what is good for his companies. The information you can get from when he is not being stupid or overly biased is probably worth putting up with the stupid.

Finally he's just involved in a lot of cool technology... and however else you feel about him you have to admire him remaining that involved when he has more than enough money to fuck off and retire.

Maybe one way to drive home the point is to just answer a lot of yes/no questions about him:

Do I think he's overselling autopilot, yes. Do I think he's wrong about bitcoin, yes. Do I think he's wrong about how to run companies, I mean probably also yes, but on average less wrong than basically anyone else talking about it, it's a complex topic but he is good at it. Do I think he's wrong about how to build rockets? Like the answer to companies. Do I think he's wrong about how to build factories? The same again. Do I think he intends to put people on mars? Yes. Do I think he will succeed? I put it at above 50% probability, which is far higher than I think of anyone else. Do I think we will get his self sustaining city? Almost certainly not. And so on and so on.

Its still a good skill picking winner in a hyper competitive environment, but he's closer to an average trust fund kid than a jobs or a page.

Steve Jobs did, I believe there are a couple others too. I agree though, the list is short.