7 ms·

Sure, you can say that, but name another person with a more impressive track record of actual accomplishments.

clouddrover 5y ago
Einstein.
staticassertion 5y ago
I can think of so many people who are radically more accomplished in vastly more interesting and important ways, it feels absurd to start listing because of how many I'd be leaving out by doing so.
- sixQuarks 5y ago
  name one then. I'm genuinely curious
  - clouddrover 5y ago
    Nikola Tesla.
  - serf 5y ago
    intellectual accomplishments: Einstein, Tesla, Vannevar Bush, Newton, Bohr, Maxwell, Faraday, Gallileo, Newton, Dirac, Rutherford financial accomplishments: Rockefeller, Getty, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Mellon, Walton, Kluge, Gates, Bezos, Buffett industrial accomplishments: Ford, Edison, Gould, Morgan, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg, Branson, Allen Lots of overlap on the lists, but I decided not to doubly-list individuals -- and the lists are by no means complete, I favored recent centuries. That said, Musk is tremendously successful and awe-inspiring; this pissing contest is a miserable thing to participate in -- but I still think it's important to point out that Musk isn't the only awe-inspiring success ever.
    - deleted 5y ago
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- renjimen 5y ago
  Even naming a few would actually help your argument, since you can think of so many
  - staticassertion 5y ago
    Can you not? Like, how about people who have made major academic or philosophical breakthroughs? Major authors? Even within business, or celebrity, Elon doesn't stick out much other than filling a small niche. The problem with naming them is that then it becomes a discussion on whether the people I've named are impressive. Someone mentioned Einstein and was downvoted. Einstein is very obviously more interesting and accomplished in my mind than Elon, but he's one of many. Turing was 23 when he wrote his thesis on algorithmic computation. There are people with multiple turing awards out there. If your yard stick is "rich person who made more money" yes, or "CEO who makes memes", or "is a celebrity", Elon is impressive relative to the general population. It's a sad, sad way to measure accomplishments, but sure.
    - Retric 5y ago
      The point is they needed to make multiple significant independent breakthroughs in established fields. Turing like a lot of pioneers is seriously overrated. When surrounded by low hanging fruit it’s easy to seemingly make a great deal of progress especially when your credited with formalizing existing ideas or making that one last step into usefulness. Einstein actually pushed boundaries in a well established field which is vastly more impressive. Musk significantly pushing the boundaries in cars, rockets, computer networks, and banking is quite impressive in that context. We can quibble about PayPal, but I am being consistent in ignoring the charging network and self driving system etc as those are emerging fields. Clearly he’s not operating alone, but few people did. Newton is perhaps the most obvious example of significant progress in independent and established fields and IMO far more impressive, but it’s really not a long list.
      - staticassertion 5y ago
        Thanks for proving my point. As I said, listing out names just means that people are going to try to say why those people are less impressive. As for Musk's accomplishments, I don't find them to be very impressive or interesting.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  Please name a few. We're all waiting. :)
- Cd00d 5y ago
  That's not an actual reply. Genuinely curious, just limit yourself to a list of 5, and don't worry about ranking so nobody more important is left out.
memonkey 5y ago
I love the meme where stans come to Elon Musks' defense no matter how vanilla the criticism is.
himaraya 5y ago
Jim Simons? Demis Hassabis? Satoshi also ranks up there in influence.
klintcho 5y ago
It's quite interesting how people keep betting against Elon. The HN crowd should consist of mostly risk-tolerant personalities, but the majority of comments are negative. Regardless of what one might think of the feasibility, no other company in the world today are as ambitions as SpaceX and Tesla (+ Neuralink). Feels like what Apple used to be during the "one more thing"-era. Both Tesla and SpaceX has been discounted so many times before, and despite proving time and time again that they will and can deliver, they keep getting discounted.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  I mentioned in another comment that I think this has to do with the very human phenomenon of the narrative paradigm shift (a type of M. Night Shamalyn plot twist). Goes something like this: The guy that took on the military industrial complex with his small little startup and actually won, with wild whacky ideas like landing rockets upright, and winning NASA contracts against the likes of Boeing and Lockheed, is actually not who you think he is. He’s not? Nope, even though he was one of the single strongest drivers of electric vehicles that is pretty much making the rest of the industry shift after the viability of electric was shown with Tesla cars. The truth is, he actually sucks. Oh, what a plot twist. Wait, does this have a happy ending now that we know he’s a really a bad guy? And then we fill in the redemption story. It’s the creepiest thing, and I have no idea why we keep doing it.
- andyxor 5y ago
  Not to take away from their brilliant engineering accomplishments, but SpaceX and Tesla were dealing with technically solved problems. We (as a species) have been to space, and we know how to build electric batteries and cars. These were at the advanced engineering stage after enormous scientific progress of the last few hundred years and going all the way back to beginning of physics and math. With AI we are at pre-science stage, hunting mammoths with flint arrowheads and wooden spears.
  - machiaweliczny 5y ago
    Or we had most figured out in the 50s but just not enough compute. Time will show.
bmitc 5y ago
It’s hard to take this comment seriously. There are oodles of tech companies with actual novel technology that actually works.
tenpies 5y ago
Jeff Bezos. I'll put it to you another way: if Tesla vanished tomorrow, life wouldn't really change. There may be a few brownouts in a corner of the planet as Tesla batteries vanish and power generators kick in, but life would largely be the same. EV adoption would continue sans Tesla just fine. Self-driving would probably even improve because there wouldn't be the risk of one greedy company, guinea-pigging people and ignoring laws for the sake of share price and potentially bringing the wraith of regulators on the sector. If Amazon vanishes, Western civilization collapses. That's it. There'd be riots on the street. Critical infrastructure would cease to work for months. Entire supply chains would fall apart and billions of people would be impacted negatively. And it's not like the world would go on. It would take years for competitors to spin up the capacity to replace the void Amazon vanishing would cause in multiple industries. And the beauty is that while Musk is clearly obsessed with Bezos, I don't think Bezos really thinks about Musk much at all. Just like we can tell that Musk checks the share price multiple times per day, but I suspect Bezos has no idea what Amazon's share price is at unless he's selling to fund other ventures. Also importantly, Bezos has set things up so when he dies, Amazon goes on just fine. If Musk dies, that's the end of Tesla.
- sixQuarks 5y ago
  Hi Jeff, it’s kinda cool you hang out in HN
- rlt 5y ago
  Jeff who? Oh the guy who has poured billions of dollars into Blue Origin over 20+ years with little to show for it aside from failed legal attempts / overturned patents to attempt to hinder SpaceX, and a penis shaped sub-orbital rocket?
me_me_me 5y ago
Ford, Edison comes into head right away and thats just US inventors/entrepreneurs. Musk has more failed/moronic ideas that there are models of teslas.

Einstein.

I can think of so many people who are radically more accomplished in vastly more interesting and important ways, it feels absurd to start listing because of how many I'd be leaving out by doing so.

sixQuarks 5y ago
name one then. I'm genuinely curious
- clouddrover 5y ago
  Nikola Tesla.
- serf 5y ago
  intellectual accomplishments: Einstein, Tesla, Vannevar Bush, Newton, Bohr, Maxwell, Faraday, Gallileo, Newton, Dirac, Rutherford financial accomplishments: Rockefeller, Getty, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Mellon, Walton, Kluge, Gates, Bezos, Buffett industrial accomplishments: Ford, Edison, Gould, Morgan, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg, Branson, Allen Lots of overlap on the lists, but I decided not to doubly-list individuals -- and the lists are by no means complete, I favored recent centuries. That said, Musk is tremendously successful and awe-inspiring; this pissing contest is a miserable thing to participate in -- but I still think it's important to point out that Musk isn't the only awe-inspiring success ever.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
renjimen 5y ago
Even naming a few would actually help your argument, since you can think of so many
- staticassertion 5y ago
  Can you not? Like, how about people who have made major academic or philosophical breakthroughs? Major authors? Even within business, or celebrity, Elon doesn't stick out much other than filling a small niche. The problem with naming them is that then it becomes a discussion on whether the people I've named are impressive. Someone mentioned Einstein and was downvoted. Einstein is very obviously more interesting and accomplished in my mind than Elon, but he's one of many. Turing was 23 when he wrote his thesis on algorithmic computation. There are people with multiple turing awards out there. If your yard stick is "rich person who made more money" yes, or "CEO who makes memes", or "is a celebrity", Elon is impressive relative to the general population. It's a sad, sad way to measure accomplishments, but sure.
  - Retric 5y ago
    The point is they needed to make multiple significant independent breakthroughs in established fields. Turing like a lot of pioneers is seriously overrated. When surrounded by low hanging fruit it’s easy to seemingly make a great deal of progress especially when your credited with formalizing existing ideas or making that one last step into usefulness. Einstein actually pushed boundaries in a well established field which is vastly more impressive. Musk significantly pushing the boundaries in cars, rockets, computer networks, and banking is quite impressive in that context. We can quibble about PayPal, but I am being consistent in ignoring the charging network and self driving system etc as those are emerging fields. Clearly he’s not operating alone, but few people did. Newton is perhaps the most obvious example of significant progress in independent and established fields and IMO far more impressive, but it’s really not a long list.
    - staticassertion 5y ago
      Thanks for proving my point. As I said, listing out names just means that people are going to try to say why those people are less impressive. As for Musk's accomplishments, I don't find them to be very impressive or interesting.
enraged_camel 5y ago
Please name a few. We're all waiting. :)
Cd00d 5y ago
That's not an actual reply. Genuinely curious, just limit yourself to a list of 5, and don't worry about ranking so nobody more important is left out.

memonkey 5y ago

I love the meme where stans come to Elon Musks' defense no matter how vanilla the criticism is.

himaraya 5y ago

Jim Simons? Demis Hassabis? Satoshi also ranks up there in influence.

klintcho 5y ago

It's quite interesting how people keep betting against Elon. The HN crowd should consist of mostly risk-tolerant personalities, but the majority of comments are negative. Regardless of what one might think of the feasibility, no other company in the world today are as ambitions as SpaceX and Tesla (+ Neuralink). Feels like what Apple used to be during the "one more thing"-era. Both Tesla and SpaceX has been discounted so many times before, and despite proving time and time again that they will and can deliver, they keep getting discounted.

runawaybottle 5y ago
I mentioned in another comment that I think this has to do with the very human phenomenon of the narrative paradigm shift (a type of M. Night Shamalyn plot twist). Goes something like this: The guy that took on the military industrial complex with his small little startup and actually won, with wild whacky ideas like landing rockets upright, and winning NASA contracts against the likes of Boeing and Lockheed, is actually not who you think he is. He’s not? Nope, even though he was one of the single strongest drivers of electric vehicles that is pretty much making the rest of the industry shift after the viability of electric was shown with Tesla cars. The truth is, he actually sucks. Oh, what a plot twist. Wait, does this have a happy ending now that we know he’s a really a bad guy? And then we fill in the redemption story. It’s the creepiest thing, and I have no idea why we keep doing it.
andyxor 5y ago
Not to take away from their brilliant engineering accomplishments, but SpaceX and Tesla were dealing with technically solved problems. We (as a species) have been to space, and we know how to build electric batteries and cars. These were at the advanced engineering stage after enormous scientific progress of the last few hundred years and going all the way back to beginning of physics and math. With AI we are at pre-science stage, hunting mammoths with flint arrowheads and wooden spears.
- machiaweliczny 5y ago
  Or we had most figured out in the 50s but just not enough compute. Time will show.

bmitc 5y ago

It’s hard to take this comment seriously. There are oodles of tech companies with actual novel technology that actually works.

tenpies 5y ago

Jeff Bezos. I'll put it to you another way: if Tesla vanished tomorrow, life wouldn't really change. There may be a few brownouts in a corner of the planet as Tesla batteries vanish and power generators kick in, but life would largely be the same. EV adoption would continue sans Tesla just fine. Self-driving would probably even improve because there wouldn't be the risk of one greedy company, guinea-pigging people and ignoring laws for the sake of share price and potentially bringing the wraith of regulators on the sector. If Amazon vanishes, Western civilization collapses. That's it. There'd be riots on the street. Critical infrastructure would cease to work for months. Entire supply chains would fall apart and billions of people would be impacted negatively. And it's not like the world would go on. It would take years for competitors to spin up the capacity to replace the void Amazon vanishing would cause in multiple industries. And the beauty is that while Musk is clearly obsessed with Bezos, I don't think Bezos really thinks about Musk much at all. Just like we can tell that Musk checks the share price multiple times per day, but I suspect Bezos has no idea what Amazon's share price is at unless he's selling to fund other ventures. Also importantly, Bezos has set things up so when he dies, Amazon goes on just fine. If Musk dies, that's the end of Tesla.

sixQuarks 5y ago
Hi Jeff, it’s kinda cool you hang out in HN
rlt 5y ago
Jeff who? Oh the guy who has poured billions of dollars into Blue Origin over 20+ years with little to show for it aside from failed legal attempts / overturned patents to attempt to hinder SpaceX, and a penis shaped sub-orbital rocket?

me_me_me 5y ago

Ford, Edison comes into head right away and thats just US inventors/entrepreneurs. Musk has more failed/moronic ideas that there are models of teslas.