I think you still being too generous. Other than Teslas which starting to get large amount of competitors who were late to EVs market, and SpaceX, which won't have many competitors because we still kind of figuring out what the heck we need to fly in space for (at this price points), Musk's basket is full of terrible failures.
The most shocking to me is a Boring company. What was promised - vast network of 3D tunnels where cars will move at 150mph speeds. Eventually trip from New York to Shanghai will take less than 2 hours.
What was delivered? A short tunnel with absolutely zero safety features, no ventilation, no exit points, build with state-of-the-art technology that turned out to be 3 times slower (per mile) than 30 years old boring machine that dug La-Manche, and Teslas are driving in that tunnel at... 35mph.
And Musk as we could all predicted came out in defense of all this tweeting that "We made the whole thing much simpler" - no elevator ramps, no high speeds, simple one-lane tunnel. And his base ate it up like some sort of genius he is that he invented moving traffic in one lane underground at bicycle-ride speed.
I say the same thing will happen to twitter. Initially it will be: - open algorithms (99.9% people would not understand what they looking at, at probably 80% of engineers wouldn't either - as an ex-Googler, I can tell you these algorithms are like rings inside a tree - hundreds of layers amassed on the top of each other over the years; - allow full free speech (so no control over even nastier language) - fight with bots.
Fast forward 5 years from now, the only people who understand the algorythms will be large bot farms and they will game the system to get throw to the top before anyone elses tweets. Just like there is reason Google is hiding their algo instead of f.e. patent those, they do that because they don't want smart people to game the system. Full free speech will bring even more maneuver to the site, and at the end of the day its impossible to remove bots. In China for 5 cents you can get someone's real ID. For 10 cents they provide you photo of ID with todays date. For 15 cents they will show up on any video call to provide they are who they are. So at the end of the day small trolls and insignificant bot farms will get wiped out, but the big players who make decent buck by trolling, they will continue undisputed. In a few years Musk will abandon Twitter to focus momentarily on another shiny object. "in fight for humanity freedom", like he couldn't do that when he proposed to solve world's hunger.
On the top of that, isn't his involvement in another project just a big fuck-you to everyone still waiting for:
- Solar City - roof shingles that will revolutionized electricity and actually will make you the homeowner to sell electricity to the power plant. - Tesla trucks and semi trucks - nothing new on that? - Boring company - no new progress after years of LV "loop". - Flying to Mars (many things changed now - from fancy trip sort of Cruise Trip with fun games etc, now the word is that many people will die during the trip and it wont be fun)
Seriously if all these projects would run full speed ahead on all cylinders, I would be happy Musk is taking over another project. But they are not. Most are terrible failures and Musk is still in hot water re: Solar City buyout. I'm starting to think all these projects were just temporary scams to boost Tesla stock value (which Musk succeed with 20 x P/E), and that's about it.
- The Tesla Cybertruck and Semi are going to be manufactured in the Austin, TX factory, which literally just opened after only 2 years of construction (mid-pandemic) – seems like progress to be.
- Who said the initial crewed missions to Mars would be a fancy sort of cruise trip?
Good luck with that, because at this rate you can literally sell snakesoil and claim it works. Take any group of say 10,000 people, have them use it for the rest of their lives, I guarantee you find few people who miraculously got some sort of disease cured.
- Who said the initial crewed missions to Mars would be a fancy sort of cruise trip?
Musk said that during the first presentation regarding the trip.
"Why would I want my kitchen to be sexy?"
"Why would I want my car to be sexy?"
100% of engineers won't either. These algorithms are all going to be neural net based, which means they need the data (which will be private) to even know what outputs will be for a given input. And why the output is such for a given input? No way to know - basically a black box.
It absolutely is an engineering and technology problem.