His beliefs are irrelevant. Appealing to them shows you are using rhetorical technique rather than logic. You are attacking his character by implying stupidity for his beliefs rather than attacking the core of his ideas. You follow up the rhetoric with a straw man: you imply that someone must be the very best to lead in order to lead rather than merely qualified to do so. This isn't a fair position and it definitely wasn't the position expressed by the person you quoted.

You then try to make the case that because these companies have gotten money from the government that it discredits their successes as if another reality they might have failed. This isn't reasonable as an argument structure. In another reality, English might be spelled differently. That doesn't mean that you don't know how to spell. The argument structure is deeply unsound.

Next you demand certainty, but you restrict the range to just Tesla and SpaceX. If you were genuine in demanding certainty, you would have to expand the range to include PayPal and Zip2, since in those cases we can say things with certainty because his involvement is over and so judgements can be made. You do this, because you have to, because if you didn't that means you would have to accept plausible reasoning. Yet the measurements which incorporate plausible reasoning, such as the stock price, refute you to an extreme extent.

By stating all this with appeals like "do you really believe" and "this is such a tiring rebuttal" you trick yourself by employing rhetoric. It makes you seem to yourself as if your argument is much stronger than it actually is. After all, you are obviously right that he doesn't actually think what you implied he thought. So when you ask that question to him you already know that the answer is no he didn't think that. Unfortunately, there is a reason as far back in Western thought as Plato rhetoric was being described as the art of being convincing without being right. Beating up the straw man makes you think like your argument is correct so much so that you grow tired of it.

> we don't really know how good these companies are...yet

His company made rockets that fly backwards and park autonomously.

So did blue origin, and that was started a couple years before spacex. I suspect this is more the case of an idea that's time came, rather than any particular feat of genius or insight by a company founder. Once you have the computing power + speed, and the built-up engineering knowledge and tools, there's nothing stopping anyone with a half a billion in government funding from building something like that.

> In 1999, after watching the rocketry biopic film October Sky, Bezos discussed forming a space company with science-fiction author Neal Stephenson.[23][24] Blue Origin was founded in 2000 in Kent, Washington, and began developing both rocket propulsion systems and launch vehicles.[25] Since the founding, the company was quite secretive about its plans[26][27] and emerged from its "self-imposed silence" only after 2015.[25] .... As early as 2005, Bezos had discussed plans to create a vertical-takeoff and landing spaceship called New Shepard. Plans for New Shepard were initially kept quiet, but Blue Origin's website indicated Bezos' desire to, "lower the cost of spaceflight so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Origin

I had no idea. I always assumed he was inspired by SpaceX. October Sky is a great movie btw.

Their rocket only went up and down. Weather balloons do that too. Not the same as an orbital rocket.

Delta Clipper landed 25 years ago, too. Vertical landings of suborbital rockets aren't anything new. Reuse of orbital rockets are.

Blue Origin has accomplished practically nothing compared to SpaceX, even if they "landed a rocket before SpaceX". In the 7 years since New Shephard first flew, they've not flown anything new. To this date, BO has not launched a single gram into orbit.

For comparison, 7 years after Falcon 1 first flew in 2006, SpaceX had flown F9 v1.1 and had built a spacecraft that flew to the ISS.

That is to be expected since SpaceX is where all the NASA funding went along with most of the talent previously working on VTVL technology.

It is not hard to imagine an alternative world where Elon Musk had nothing to do with the SpaceX company and the same achievements would have been reach. Or even an alternative world where the NASA funding would have gone to a completely different company, or—yet even—a world where NASA would have developed this technology them selfs (hiring the same experts off course).

All is to say that Elon Musk is not some essential figure in the development of VTVL rockets. Rocket engineers would have developed it regardless in any world where the Space Shuttle is sunset.

VTVL rockets existed before SpaceX. In fact SpaceX started by hiring engineers which had been working on the same thing at Blue Origin. SpaceX also got a bunch of funding from NASA to develop exactly this thing.

I think if it wasn’t for SpaceX this technology would still exist today, just developed by a different company (or even NASA them selfs if they were so inclined). SpaceX just happened to be the right company at the right time with the right engineers onboard to reap the benefits afterwards.

they did this in like the 90's why make it out like SpaceX is the only one capable of doing this? some of those engineers are now working for blue origin

It is also perfectly feasible for a company to perform well despite their CEO not because of them.

They don't even produce great products. Tesla is consistently rated one of the least reliable cars.

Apple is not a great place to work, but it's a perfectly good company.