The counterfactual that if Jeff Bezos had not been born another person would have created an Amazon, is somewhat reasonable, but you can easily conceive counter

The counterfactual that if Jeff Bezos had not been born another person would have created an Amazon, is somewhat reasonable, but you can easily conceive counterexamples. Take Musk and Tesla or SpaceX. Battery-powered cars had existed for more than 100 years. They were quite popular in 1900 (in the US, 38% of cars were powered by batteries vs only 22% by gasoline; the remaining 40% were powered by steam [1]). How many times did someone try to bring an electric car to the market? Answer: many times. All failed, until Tesla. Could Tesla have failed too? You bet. In the end one can argue that plug-in hybrids make more sense: people generally drive less than 50 miles per day, so hybrids providing a 60-mile range can run in zero-emission mode for 95% of the time. So, I can definitely see a world without Tesla. Not with a Tesla-like company 5 years later, or 10 years later. A world with never Tesla. How about SpaceX? Well, rockets had been stagnant (or getting worse, cough-cough SLS) for so many decades. I can certainly see a world where SpaceX happens 50 years later than in our world. Or 100. Just look at Concorde: more than 50 years after it first flew, we have no civilian supersonic jet. How about Apple? Are you kidding? Of course I can see a world where computers suck universally, just like printers do. We live in a world where programming languages suck universally. I guess in a world where a Steve Jobs for programming languages existed, we'd just postulate that without that person the perfect language would arrive all the same, maybe with a 5 year delay. Well no, we've had programming languages for 70 years, and they still suck. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle#Golden_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...